Here, boiled down, are the main points Judge Dennis M. Sweeney made from the bench at the Sheila Dixon sentencing Thursday:

He scolded Dixon for her behavior – “Ms Dixon leaves the office in total disgrace.”  Having to leave office, he said, is “a badge of dishonor that she will live with for the rest of her life.”

He scolded Dixon for blaming others and not herself – “Throughout these cases, Ms. Dixon has claimed that the prosecution here was not well grounded in law and evidence and that her problems were the fault of the media or a politically motivated or incompetent prosecutor…or a confused and misbehaving jury.” That view, he said, “simply does not stack up with the facts.”

He said the case against Dixon was strong – In the gift card case, he said, the evidence against Dixon was “strong if not indeed overwhelming” and the jury was “generous” to convict her on only one count. Had the perjury case gone to trial “conviction on one or more counts would have been a virtual certainty.”

He thinks Baltimore’s politicians are too cozy with developers – “The ethical milieu of the past particularly as it relates to relationships with developers can not continue,” he said. Otherwise “the city will be doomed to repeat the cycle of petty and tawdry corruption and special entitlement.”

He slammed City Solicitor George Nilson – Sweeney was pretty incensed that Nilson took a position in an affadavit basically giving the city’s endorsement to one of the defense’s most paper-thin arguments, offered in a pretrial motion. That was the contention that prominent developer Ronald Lipscombsomehow  “could not be considered under city ethics laws to be either ‘doing business’ with the City or ‘being regulated by the City and thus Ms. Dixon was free to accept any gift from him regardless of the amount.”

He slammed other city officials for not speaking up about Nilson’s affadavit – “This official position of the City was not met to my knowledge by any dissent or outrage by other elected City officials at the time it became public.”

He said the jury came through like champs – “Before this trial began many said that a Baltimore City jury like the one picked in this case would never be able to deal with it. Many commentators glibly predicted . . . .a hung jury split along lines of race, sex or income.”

“In contrast, from what I saw in this case, all of the jurors took the case very seriously, put aside their personal biases and worked very hard together as a team to resolve the case based on the evidence in the case and the law.”

– compiled by Fern Shen