Mr. Silver, 71, a Democrat who served more than two decades as the Assembly speaker before he was forced to resign after his arrest in January, will automatically forfeit the Assembly seat to which he was first elected nearly 40 years ago.
The jury’s verdict came in the fifth week of Mr. Silver’s trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, in which he faced seven counts of honest services fraud, extortion and money laundering. He was convicted on all counts.
This is yet another high profile case in which a politician has been convicted of corruption while there are still some basic disagreements about how to prove corruption when there is no evidence of an explicit quid pro quo, or when it is not clear whether what is being traded is political benefits or personal benefits. We’ve got the Va. Gov. McDonnell case up on a cert. petition, the Blagojevich case too. Before that there were serious questions about the Don Seligman conviction. So far the Supreme Court has not provided much clarity, but I’m getting a sense that it soon might.
In the meantime, I compare New York levels of conviction prosecutions to what goes on in Congress in Why Isn’t Congress More Corrupt? A Preliminary Inquiry , 84 Fordham Law Review 429 ( 2015).