NEW YORK, Oct 15 (Reuters Legal) - Imprisoned former Computer Associates sales chief Stephen Richards was resentenced on Thursday to the 3-1/2 years time served following the New Zealander's guilty plea to fraud, his lawyer said.

Richards's lawyer, David Zornow, said U.S. District Judge I. Leo Glasser in Brooklyn, New York, made the order at a hearing in response to a federal appeals court ruling in August.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals did not rescind Richards's guilty plea, but said he should be resentenced because Glasser did not give him sufficient credit for accepting responsibility.

Richards, 45, a native of New Zealand, pleaded guilty in November 2006 to taking part in a fraud to artificially boost quarterly revenues. He began serving a seven-year sentence in February 2007 at Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, Calif.

His wife and five children have been living in Australia since August 2006, Zornow said.

"We are extraordinarily gratified that the judge has reduced the sentence, which will allow him to reunite with his family in Australia and try to put their lives back together again," said Zornow, the global head of the litigation at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and leads the firm's white collar crime group in New York.

No one was immediately available at Glasser's chambers to confirm Thursday's decision.

Zornow said Richards would be deported from the United States, but it was unclear how long the process would take.

The three-judge appeals court panel upheld the 12-year prison sentence of Sanjay Kumar, the former chief executive of the Long Island company that changed its name to CA Inc. Kumar has petitioned the full court to reconsider the decision. He is represented by Paul Schechtman of Stillman, Friedman & Shechtman in New York.

In 2004, U.S. prosecutors accused Kumar and other executives of manipulating earnings by backdating software contracts to make it appear there were signed license agreements for the quarter.

Criminal charges against the company were dismissed in 2007, three years after it agreed to pay $225 million toward repaying shareholders.

The district court case is USA v. Kumar et al., U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn), No. 04-00846. The appeal is USA v. Kumar, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, No. 06-cr-5482, 06-cr-5654.

(Reporting by Grant McCool; Additional reporting by Terry Baynes of Reuters Legal)