LAS VEGAS — Margaret Rudin, dubbed the 'Black Widow' for the murder of her fifth husband, was sentenced to life in prison Friday while elsewhere in the same courthouse the lawyer she blames for her conviction was getting a marriage license.

Michael Amador

While a judge on the second floor of the Clark County Courthouse told Rudin she would spend at least 20 years behind bars and "grow old ... locked away in the cold confines of [a] prison cell," her former defense attorney, Michael Amador, filled out paperwork on the first floor for his October wedding.

"Irony? I don't know about that," said Amador, planting a kiss on the head of his smiling fiancee, Maggie Mabie. "It's a great love story."

Mabie, a Court TV fan who won the lawyer's heart after coming from Los Angeles to follow the case in person, flashed a sparkly rectangular diamond and said, "It's going to be a great wedding."

Amador never entered the courtroom where his former client was being savaged by one of her husband's friends as a "female Ted Bundy" who hid behind a "sweet, grandmotherly Southern Belle" act, and Rudin, 58, did not know of Amador's presence at the courthouse.

"Her life is about money and the control of money, how to get money and how make herself comfortable," prosecutor Chris Owens told Judge Joseph Bonaventure.

Dressed in a blue jail jumpsuit and orange sneakers, she showed no emotion when Bonaventure read the angry note from the victim's friend, Sharon Melton, nor when he handed down a sentence more lenient than the prosecution and the parole department had urged. They had asked for a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The judge cited her lack of criminal record in his decision.

Rudin maintains her innocence and plans an appeal. She spoke only briefly at the sentencing, acknowledging supporters who had written the judge on her behalf.

"My family and friends and like 400 people did e-mail and write letters," she said in a soft high-pitched voice.

The former socialite was convicted in May of shooting her husband, Ron Rudin, to get at his $11 million fortune at the conclusion of a messy, drawn out trial that even the prosecution called a "black eye" to the city's legal community. Amador, his own employees later said, was woefully unprepared for the complicated case. He overslept for court, performed sloppy cross-examinations and repeatedly infuriated Bonaventure who called him a man without honor.

After a jury found Rudin guilty of first-degree murder, she fired Amador, and her new defense team collected a witness statements alleging that the lawyer was a cocaine addict who hired two hookers a night during the trial and was more interested in lucrative book and movie deals than legal strategy.

At a hearing last Friday for a new trial, Rudin's defense team briefly touched on Amador's incompetence but mainly focused on what they called serious errors by the judge. The defense argued, for example, that Bonaventure's private meeting with Rudin several days into the trial to discuss Amador's performance was a clear ethical violation.

Before the sentencing, Bonventure denied the defense motion for a new trial. The judge seemed furious with the defense's decision to concentrate on his own behavior rather than Amador's and hinted that he might have granted the motion had the defense followed his advice to call witnesses to the lawyer's incomptenece.

"[Y]ou chose to only argue that which you felt was important," Bonaventure said, adding that the "deafening roar of counsel's silence" on charges related to Amador's conduct, "will forever allow this court to shut the door behind them as they scatter into the breeze and to assume such claims could not be further substantiated."

Amador said he was also closing the door on the case. Looking tan and much healthier than at trial, he said, "My life doesn't have a rearview mirror."

"I have no regrets about decisions I made or things I did because they always lead to new doors opening," he added squeezing his fiancee's hand.