MANHATTAN (CN) — Former New York state Sen. Dean Skelos and his son have delayed lengthy corruption sentences for more than a year by pointing to a Supreme Court ruling they predict will earn them a new trial.
If sharp questions by an appellate panel Thursday are any indication, however, the New York-based Second Circuit is unwilling to let the Skeloses avoid prison based on that precedent.
The hour-long oral argument had barely begun this morning before U.S. Circuit Judge Reena Raggi accused an attorney for the disgraced senator of misrepresenting the government's case.
“It’s just helpful that we stay focused on what [prosecutors] did and didn’t say,” Raggi said.
Alexandra Shapiro, a partner at the Manhattan firm Shapiro Arato, had accused prosecutors moments earlier of encouraging jurors to embrace an expansive theory of corruption that they knew stood on shaky legal ground.
“It’s just not so,” Raggi replied, abruptly cutting off this line of argument.
With that punch, the Skelos family’s appeal began as precipitously as the senator's fortunes have fallen since his May 2015 indictment.
Once the New York Legislature’s most powerful Republican, Skelos sat with his son, Adam Skelos, a little more than a year ago for a federal bribery trial grounded in nepotism.
Prosecutors accused the senator of milking his political connections with the state’s heaviest donor, Glenwood Management, to score work for his son, who had been hoping for extra cashflow to cover the cost of a $600,000 apartment.
At the men’s sentencing on May 12, 2016, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood determined that Adam Skelos was at the heart of the hustle. She gave the 33-year-old a prison term of 6 1/2 years, with a five-year sentence for his dad, and was spotted outside the courtroom today, watching the proceedings on closed-circuit television to see if those terms would stick.
Wood had noted at last year’s sentencing that a pending Supreme Court decision stood ready to rattle the corruption-law landscape.
With the Supreme Court poised to reverse the corruption conviction of former Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell, Judge Wood said: “There is a danger that the jury decided this case based on a rationale that will be rejected by the Supreme Court.”
Shapiro, attorney to the 69-year-old former senator, quoted this remark in full Thursday morning for the Second Circuit.
Unlike the father-and-son scheme at issue, McDonnell was convicted of having arranged a meeting for a donor who spent more than $175,000 on the governor, picking up the tab on both of his daughters’ weddings, as well as a Rolex for McDonnell and a Bergdoff Goodman shopping spree for his wife.