James Cohen comments to Newsday on former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s conviction and the appeals, which are likely to focus in part on the government’s aggressive use of “honest services fraud” charges in public corruption cases.
Jim Cohen, a Fordham criminal-law professor, noted that Bharara’s office probably anticipated issues about the honest-services charges right from the start, and fully vetted their case to stand up on appeal.
“It would surprise me,” he said, “if the prosecutors weren’t very careful to make that very difficult to develop.”
Read the entire Newsday article.