Cheryl Bader was quoted in a Politico article about the corruption trial of former state Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver.
“There’s a lot here that smells, and it gives the government a much greater opportunity to say, ‘Look, there’s just too much here that smells rotten, so something is rotten,’” said Cheryl Bader, a criminal law professor at Fordham Law School and a former federal prosecutor.
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A big challenge for the defense in this regard will be defending Silver’s actions as potentially unethical, but not illegal. But having to ask jurors to essentially hold their nose “does not necessarily make for a happy defense,” according to Bader.
“The defense then has to say, ‘Look, we may not like this about politicians, we may not like this about the way lawyers get paid, but it doesn’t make it a crime just because we don’t like it,” she said. “But I think the fact that people don’t like it and saw him using it so much to his own financial advantage isn’t going to make him at all sympathetic.”
