Sheldon Silver's Retrial Begins In Manhattan

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — Ex-Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver begins his retrial on corruption charges on Monday, after his original conviction was overturned last year.

Silver was a longtime fixture of New York politics, and served as the speaker in the state assembly for 20 years until he was convicted in 2015. During his trial, prosecutors said Silver took $4 million in kickbacks in exchange for political actions. In July, an appeals court overturned Silver's conviction thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling that changed the definition of when a public official may be tried for public corruption.

Silver, a Democrat from the Lower East Side, was elected as speaker in 1994 and served until his conviction in 2015.

Joon Kim, a former federal prosecutor, said last year that the evidence presented at Silver's first trial "was sufficient to prove all the crimes charged against Silver."

"While we are disappointed by the Second Circuit's decision, we respect it, and look forward to retrying the case," Kim said in a statement last year. "Although this decision puts on hold the justice that New Yorkers got upon Silver's conviction, we look forward to presenting to another jury the evidence of decades-long corruption by one of the most powerful politicians in New York State history."

In 2015, prosecutors said that Silver accepted millions of dollars in payments in exchange for official actions. Authorities presented evidence that Silver ensured that state grants totaling $500,000 were awarded to a cancer researcher at Columbia, Dr. Robert Taub. In a complicated exchange of favors, Taub then referred his patients with legal claims to a law firm that gave Silver a cut of those patients' legal fees, prosecutors said in 2014.

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