Around the state, political leaders in both parties lauded the decision as a needed, if sorry, outcome. Advocates of political reform said the sentence delivered a warning in a state where political leaders — some aldermen, congressmen, and even the governor who immediately preceded Mr. Blagojevich, George Ryan — seemed to be headed off to jail on a regular basis.

“If there’s a public official out there who is thinking about committing a crime, boy, they ought to be thinking twice,” Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said of Mr. Blagojevich’s 14-year sentence, of which he is expected to serve almost 12 years at a minimum. Mr. Ryan, a Republican who was also convicted of federal corruption charges, is serving far less: six and a half years.

Mr. Blagojevich showed little reaction to his sentence, though his lawyers had argued vehemently for a far shorter term. He seemed aware by Wednesday that a significant prison term was inevitable, and, technically, the charges could have put him behind bars for life. After speaking to the court — and making his first public apologies — he comforted his wife, Patti, who sat in the front row, crying at times.

Since his arrest three years ago and the unraveling of his political career that swiftly followed, Mr. Blagojevich had announced at every opportunity that he had done nothing wrong. Prosecutors said that he had sought personal gain — campaign donations, especially — in exchange for making an appointment to the Senate seat and for state policies related to hospitals and a racetrack. But he insisted, on television talk shows and in testimony at his own trial, that his political chatter did not amount to law breaking.

On Wednesday, though, that changed. Mr. Blagojevich, a lifelong politician who served as a legislator in Springfield and Washington before becoming governor, said quietly that he accepted his jury’s findings, acknowledged them, and was sorry. “I never set out to cross lines,” Mr. Blagojevich said, in a speech to the court that lasted less than an hour and touched on the worries he had now for his young daughters, for his family’s financial survival, and for all that stood ahead.