Van der Sloot sentence appeal under consideration

Birmingham, Ala (WIAT) Joran van der Sloot's 28 year murder sentence is under review by the Peruvian justice system. And any reduction of his prison term there could bring him to Birmingham to face federal charges he scammed the family of missing Mountain Brook teen Natalee Holloway. A court in Lima has accepted the paperwork in the case and turned it over to Peru's Supreme Court for review and evaluation. The crux of the appeal is that a former defense lawyer gave van der Sloot bad advice promising a guilty plea would get him 15 years. Instead he got 28. The Dutchman is serving a murder sentence in the death of a 21 year old Peruvian student. The corpse of Stephany Flores was found in van der Sloot's Lima hotel room five years to the day of Natalee Holloway's disappearance on a graduation trip to Aruba. Van der Sloot confessed he killed Flores in a fit of rage after she found material about Natalee on his laptop. A court convicted him instead of killing and robbing her...hence the longer sentence. Van der Sloot is considered the prime suspect in Holloway's disappearance back in 2005. Natalee was last seen leaving an Aruban bar with van der Sloot and two of his friends. He was questioned but never charged by Aruban authorities. But he does face wire fraud charges after he was indicted by a federal grand jury here in Birmingham. The feds say he promised information about Natalee's fate to the Holloway family, took their money, but only gave them bogus information. It's believed he used the Holloway money to travel to Peru for a poker tournament. That's where he met Flores. The U.S. tried to extradite van der Sloot to face those federal charges but Peru is insisting he serve his murder time there first.