Skakel Lawyers May Have Challenge Winning Bail When Michael C. Skakel appears in Stamford Superior Court on Thursday to make the case that he be released on bail while prosecutors try to get his 2002 murder conviction reinstated, Judge Gary J. White is the man he will have to persuade. Michael C. Skakel at a court hearing this month in which a request for bail was denied. But this will not be the first time that Judge White, a Harvard-trained former public defender who has been on the Connecticut bench for 17 years, has weighed in on the hot-button case, and based on how that round went, Mr. Skakel's lawyers may have their work cut out for them. Mr. Skakel has been in prison since June 2002, when a jury found him guilty of the fatal bludgeoning 27 years earlier of Martha Moxley, his neighbor in Greenwich, with a golf club. They were both 15. He has served 11 years of his term of 20 years to life, and is housed at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison. Mr. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy and born to a wealthy family, has mounted several appeals. In October, his lawyers persuaded Thomas A. Bishop, a habeas corpus judge in Rockville, Conn., to throw out the 2002 conviction by blaming an earlier lawyer, Mickey Sherman, for providing "ineffective counsel" during the trial. Prosecutors have said they will appeal that decision; Judge Bishop insisted that bail be decided in the Stamford/Norwalk Judicial District, where the original case was tried. Judge White's involvement in the case was as the chairman of a three-judge panel that reviewed - and upheld - Mr. Skakel's sentence as part of a little-known division within the Superior Court of Connecticut. Known as the Sentence Review Division, it has the power to modify sentences at the request of a defendant, though its scope is theoretically limited to cases where the punishment may be disproportionate or inappropriate. Panels have the power to increase penalties as well as decrease them, though the division's records show that if it takes any action, it lessens punishments far more often than it increases them. About 2,500 applications have been processed since 1996, and in the 27 instances where the division found a modification warranted, all but two resulted in reduced sentences. In Mr. Skakel's case, one of his lawyers, Hope Seeley, filed a request for a review in 2002, just after his sentencing. Ordinarily, a few dozen cases might be heard each month during a day of hearings in Middletown, Conn., with the decisions by the panels to follow. But the decision to affirm Mr. Skakel's sentence was not made until Jan. 24, 2012, nearly a decade after the application arrived. Mr. Skakel's lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. But some lawyers suggested that a likely reason for the delay might have been the defense team's desire to allow some of their appeals to run their course. Because the decisions of the division are supposed to be final, a defendant runs the risk of getting what he wished for: a lower sentence - but at the expense of forgoing an even better outcome from an appeals court. None of the case files reveal much about the judges" deliberations. They note Mr. Skakel's complaint that his sentence was "inappropriate and disproportionate," and that he had been punished for showing a lack of remorse when he was maintaining his innocence. Prosecutors emphasized the "vicious and violent" nature of the crime, while the victim's brother, John Moxley, also addressed the division, saying, "Michael belongs in jail for the rest of his life." Given its limited scope in such matters, the panel "finds there is nothing inappropriate or disproportionate about the sentence imposed by the trial court in this case," according to the decision. One sign that Judge White is not shy about a case expected to draw crowds, second-guessers and no end of glare is that he is now the administrative judge for the Stamford/Norwalk district. It fell to him to assign the judge for Mr. Skakel's bail hearing, and rather than hand it to someone else, he seems to have taken it for himself. "You can't cast him as either a hard-nosed or a soft judge," said Phil Russell, a criminal defense lawyer in Stamford. He goes where he thinks the case ought to take him. Judge White is well known around Stamford, partly because his father was a Baptist minister there. "He's the smartest guy in the room," Mr. Russell said. He can show great humanity and mercy and also can hand down a severe prison sentence without blinking. No one can tell him what to do. Kristin Hussey contributed reporting.