As the public corruption trial of State Assemblyman Sheldon Silver heads to closing arguments on Monday, the clash in the courtroom has been handled largely by well-staffed government and defense legal teams, each with a wealth of experience in handling corruption cases.
But on Thursday, two unfamiliar lawyers took the stage to try to shape the instructions that the judge will give to the jury before deliberations.
In a case in which no witness testified directly to knowledge of an illegal quid pro quo, how Judge Valerie E. Caproni tells jurors to interpret the evidence as it relates to the law could sway deliberations — a fact certainly not lost on the government or the defense.
The two lawyers had largely disappeared during Mr. Silver’s three-week trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan; James M. McDonald sat quietly at the end of the prosecution table, while Robert K. Kry, a defense lawyer, did not even show up in court.
But it was clear late on Thursday, with the parties and the judge seated around a conference table and the jury not present, that Mr. McDonald and Mr. Kry had critical roles as legal specialists in the case — “the law guys,” as several experts put it — a role the public rarely hears about.
The law guys must master the legal aspects of the case, and be steeped in precedents and in issues that might become the focus of an appeal or need to be responded to in court at a moment’s notice. This is of particular importance in public corruption cases, where the rules changed about five years ago, after the Supreme Court imposed the requirement in honest services fraud cases that the government prove a quid pro quo. Four of the seven counts against Mr. Silver, a Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who had been the longtime Assembly speaker, involved alleged honest services fraud.