The payoff for winning your argument at the U.S. Supreme Court? For Roanoke attorneys Melissa Friedman and Tony Anderson, it was a reduction of four years in their client's sentence.

Anderson and Friedman represented the former president of Burruss Co., a Lynchburg-based lumber business that dissolved a decade ago. John Jackson had been convicted of federal charges of fraud and embezzlement linked to the company's demise and in 2007 drew a nine-year prison sentence. In February, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an embezzlement conviction in a decision based on filed briefs, not oral arguments.

A point of the appeal was whether withholding money from a worker pension fund constituted embezzlement, or whether the fund should have become a creditor in bankruptcy proceedings.

On Tuesday, the case was back in U.S. District Court in Lynchburg, where Judge Norman Moon reduced Jackson's sentence to five years. He has already served half of that.

Anderson said after the hearing that while he had hoped Jackson, who has heart problems, might be released straightaway, he was grateful for the sentence reduction.

Former Burruss Chief Financial Officer Larry Carey, who also had an embezzlement charge overturned by the Supreme Court, was resentenced Tuesday. His sentence dropped from seven years and three months to four years and two months.

-- Mike Gangloff