After almost four hours of listening to lawyers on both sides battle it out, a Palm Beach County judge sentence Dalia Dippolito to 16 years in prison.

Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley denied the request by prosecutors to exceed the 20-year sentence previously handed down to Dippolito during her 2011 trial, which ultimately got thrown out on appeal. Kelley also rejected the defense’s request to lower the sentence to four years. Instead, he decided on a 16-year sentence after weighing in mitigating factors.

Dippolito’s case became infamous after the Boynton Beach police officers recorded her reaction when they told her that her now-former husband, Michael Dippolito, had been killed. It was part of a plan to set the suspect up.

In reality, Michael Dippolito was alive and physically well, because the hit man that his wife hired to take him in 2009 out had rolled over on her and contacted the police. Rather than arrest on suspicion of hiring someone to murder her husband, police allowed her to think that he’d been killed.

Her reaction, in some people’s opinions, was Oscar-worthy. Others thought it was clearly see-through as she belted out a deep wail and grabbed onto on an officer for support.

Later, after her scheme was exposed, Dippolito claimed she thought she was auditioning for a reality show when she conversed with the hit man. The court didn’t buy it.

Michael Dippolito was the only witness to talk at the hearing today. He heard evidence for the first time since the botched hit man incident, about his former wife’s intricate plan to have him killed by an old flame that she rekindled a relationship while still married to him.

“She has like a two-faced personality,” her hit man “friend” said in a 2009 police interview. “You could be sitting in the car talking to her or out to dinner talking to her, and all of a sudden she’ll just, like, have a tantrum. Like, if she doesn’t have it her way, then it’s the highway.”

Dippolito’s lawyers already vowed to appeal the conviction well before the judge handed down the sentence. They claim one of the jury members fell asleep during her last trial, which was also the third trial for Dippolito. A request was for a fourth trial was denied earlier this month after a judge said he never saw a single jury member sleeping.

[Feature Photo: AP/Lannis Waters/Palm Beach Post, Pool]