Supreme Court Won't Review Sheldon Silver's Corruption Case

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — The U.S. Supreme Court won't hear arguments from the corruption trial of Sheldon Silver, the former state assembly speaker whose extortion conviction was overturned last year.

Silver, a longtime Lower East Side politician, had his conviction overturned in July by an appeals court. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court said they wouldn't review arguments in the case, meaning that Silver will likely face a re-trial later this year.

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.

Silver was elected as speaker in 1994 and served until his conviction in 2015. Silver was originally sentenced to serve 12 years in prison.

The conviction was overturned last year thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that changed the definition of when a public official may be tried for public corruption.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan promised to re-try Silver.

"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," the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Joon Kim said in July.

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