By Jonathan Stempel
April 6 (Reuters) - A former BP Plc rig supervisorwho pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in the 2010 Gulf ofMexico oil spill was sentenced to 10 months of probation onWednesday, concluding a federal criminal case in which no onereceived prison time over the disaster.
Donald Vidrine, 68, was sentenced by U.S. District JudgeStanwood Duval in New Orleans, in accordance with a pleaagreement in which the defendant admitted to the negligentdischarge of oil, a Clean Water Act violation.
Vidrine and another supervisor aboard the Deepwater Horizondrilling rig had been accused by the U.S. Department of Justiceof failing to properly conduct necessary pressure tests beforethe April 20, 2010 blowout of BP's Macondo oil well.
The blowout caused the deaths of 11 workers and the largestU.S. offshore oil spill.
A lawyer for Vidrine, Jan Frankowski, confirmed his client'ssentence. He declined to comment further. The Justice Departmentdid not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Justice Department probe into the spill led to criminalcharges against just four, mostly lower-level BP employees.
The other rig supervisor, Robert Kaluza, was acquitted inFebruary by a jury of the same pollution charge as Vidrine's.
Kaluza and Vidrine previously faced manslaughter charges,but those were dropped.
Former BP Vice President David Rainey was acquitted by ajury last June of charges he lied to federal agents about howmuch oil was spilled.
The fourth defendant, engineer Kurt Mix, was sentenced tosix months of probation last November after pleading guilty todamaging a computer, a misdemeanor.
Mix had been convicted in 2013 of obstruction of justice fordeleting hundreds of text and voice messages, but jurormisconduct led to that conviction being overturned.
Another federal judge in New Orleans, Carl Barbier, onMonday gave final approval to BP's roughly $18.7 billionsettlement with the U.S. government and five states over thespill.
The case is U.S. v. Vidrine, U.S. District Court, EasternDistrict of Louisiana, No. 12-cr-00265. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by JonathanOatis)
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