SICKENING VICTIM ACT FOOLED JUDGE By ANDREA PEYSER - New York Post Online Edition: Seven

GAG ON THIS: Terror-helper lawyer Lynne Stewart is all smiles yesterday after getting a wrist-slap sentence of 28 months.

October 17, 2006 -- IT WAS all just an act. Lynne Stewart, a former lawyer who specialized in spreading terror and hate around the world, lumbered into a courtroom looking sick, crestfallen and oh, so sorry.

She bounced out of the bleak room hours later like she'd just won the lottery. And, well, she had.

"People are clamoring for a party!" Stewart announced when it was over. And she put her arm around me as she walked.

Stewart had faced 30 years in prison for smuggling out messages of death from her client, imprisoned terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman. The blind sheik, who has followers throughout the Middle East, called for the slayings of infidels - nonbelievers in his violent brand of Islam.

Stewart knew damn well that her efforts on behalf of the cleric could result in the deaths of innocents. Even the judge had to admit it.

So her handlers used a strategy to limit her time in jail that has helped celebrity miscreants from time immemorial: They turned her into a victim.

And wouldn't you know it? It worked!

A clearly admiring Judge John Koeltl sentenced her to just two years and four months in prison.

"I can do that standing on my head!" Stewart crowed after court.

But here's the kicker. One reason the judge cited for going easy on Stewart was the fact she'd lost her license to practice law - and was, therefore, no longer in the position to repeat her crimes.

I've got news for the judge, and it comes from Stewart herself, outside on the courthouse steps:

"I am back out and I'm staying out until an appeal that I hope will vindicate me - and that I hope will make me back into the lawyer I was!"

So much for humility.

Earlier, Stewart behaved like a contrite puppy who'd been caught chewing a pair of shoes.

Her lawyers argued she's a good person who just tried to help a client. The judge was skeptical.

Then they contended she's too sick and far too fat - this is an argument? - to serve hard time.

Lawyer Jill Levine warned that Stewart's tremendous girth gives her a higher risk for recurrence of her breast cancer, which now is in remission.

"Obese women make more estrogen than women who are leaner," she argued. "Cancers are harder to detect in obese women."

Lawyer Elizabeth Fink made the bizarre pronouncement that "women can't wear bras into prison" and that "women lawyers are . . . abused and harassed on a continual level."

"If you send her to prison, she is going to die."

Then Stewart rose. In a small voice, the former firebrand begged the judge, "Permit me to live in the world. Permit me to live out the rest of my life productively, lovingly, righteously."

It did the trick.

The judge all but ignored prosecutor Andrew Dember's protests that Stewart "doesn't accept responsibility, even at this late date."

Instead, he commended her on her decades of defending the poor. There is no evidence anyone died as a direct result of Stewart's acts, he said.

We'll never know, will we?

He gave her a kiss.

And for the rest of us, a kick in the teeth.