Mr. Marshall’s lawyers paused at this point to zero in on a moment of Marshall largesse, heretofore practically absent in the courtroom. When Mr. Marshall came into some money his father had set aside for him to use when he turned 21, he quickly paid off his grandfather’s mortgage and bought his grateful mother a swimming pool.  His mother remarried, to Charles H. Marshall, a man “strong, disciplined, conservative in thought and action,” Mr. Marshall has said, according to his lawyers. But while the hitting may have stopped, Tony found himself frozen out of his mother’s life as his stepfather sent him off to boarding and military schools. After Charles Marshall died in 1952, Mrs. Astor married Vincent Astor, who had as little use for her son as his predecessor did. Anthony Marshall has said he saw his mother twice in the six years she was with Mr. Astor before his death.  Like his maternal grandfather, John H. Russell, before him, Mr. Marshall joined the Marines in 1942, and stormed Iwo Jima, where he earned a Purple Heart. This alone seemed to move the sentencing judge, Justice A. Kirke Bartley Jr., whose father went through boot camp at Parris Island just months behind Mr. Marshall.  His mother was worried sick, according to testimony. He came home, enrolled in college and worked on the U-2 spy-plane program. A colleague on that program wrote one of the roughly 75 letters Justice Bartley received in recent weeks asking for leniency.  Mr. Marshall moved overseas in 1958, a journey to the exotic that began with his appointment as the United States consul in Istanbul and led to ambassadorships in the Malagasy Republic, Trinidad and Kenya.  He came home to the private sector in the late 1970s, and managed the Astor estate and foundation. He joined a score of boards, foundations and institutes.  He produced plays, with his mother’s financial help, like “Alice in Wonderland” in 1982. More recently, he was one of the producers of the stunning, blistering, Tony-winning version of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave.  That was in 2003, and Mr. Marshall must have felt grand. But his mother’s death was just four years off, and the trial that would ruin his name, six.  The fragile specter of his mother had hung over the courtroom all year. “Would she blanch at this spectacle?” Justice Bartley asked on Monday. A rhetorical question, but the judge also sought to answer another: did the mother ever really love the son, for whom there was never any room as a youth, and did the boy grow into a loving man?  “I do believe that she did love you, Mr. Marshall,” the judge said on Monday. “And your acts notwithstanding, I do believe that you loved your mother.”  The boy who knows whether that was true sat still as a stump in the old man’s body, but for the uncontrollable tremor of the hand that betrays him.  A version of this news analysis appears in print on December 22, 2009, on Page A34 of the New York edition with the headline: Lawyers Tried to Brighten Grim Courtroom Image of an Aged Thief. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Defense lawyers urged the judge to see Anthony D. Marshall as the war hero, the international attaché, the late-in-life Broadway producer.