I don't know anything about it, but from the Des Moines Register, it seems like a lot of people felt there was a miscarriage of justice:
"There was false testimony and willful manipulation, and that makes this a shocking case of prosecutorial misconduct."
"An unprecedented letter, recently sent to Kevin Techau, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, signed by 107 former high level Department of Justice officials, FBI directors, federal judges and prestigious law professors attests to the extraordinary prosecutorial misconduct which exacted the most possible punitive sentence for Rubashkin"
Trump commuted Sholom's sentence in 2017, apparently.
I'd suggest a different phrase than "prominent Jews"; the family are "ultra-Orthodox Jews of the Lubavitcher hasidic movement" not representatives of some sort of Jewish privilege in general.
