Former President of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver, was sentenced to 78 months in prison on Monday after having been convicted of corruption charges twice since 2015.
United States District Judge Valerie Caproni, appointed by Obama, sentenced Silver, a Democrat, for the third time after previous convictions had been overturned in whole or in part.
Silver’s attorneys asked his client to fulfill his mandate in home confinement, citing the coronavirus and his experience with cancer and chronic kidney disease, The New York Times reported.
Silver’s attorneys said in a letter that his “multiple health conditions” “would significantly predispose him to worse outcomes if he becomes infected with Covid-19, including death.”
“The risk here is very real,” his attorney James Loonam said at the hearing, the Times reported.
But Caproni said Silver “acted out of a sense of greed” and decided that spending time in prison was not appropriate.
“This was corruption, pure and simple,” he said.
The former president of the state assembly acknowledged that his behavior was “improper, selfish, and ethically indefensible.”
“I know that many people have lost faith in their government,” Silver said, according to the newspaper. “And I know that my actions contributed.”
Silver served as a speaker for more than 20 years before being convicted in 2015 of taking nearly $ 4 million in illicit payments in exchange for favors. He was involved in real estate development related schemes and charged in one involving a cancer researcher at Columbia University.
The former president was originally sentenced to 12 years, but was released on bail until the conviction was overturned in 2017, according to the Times.
During his new trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years before the cancer investigator’s sentence was overturned. But the appeals court upheld his conviction regarding real estate developers and another money laundering scheme, which is what he was sentenced for on Monday.
Federal prosecutors had said that a sentence of more than 10 years by Silver was appropriate, but requested that Caproni retain at least the seven-year sentence of the second trial.
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