EDITORIAL: Sheldon Silver should step down as Assembly speaker
Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan, acting as a special prosecutor, said he found no crime committed in Brooklyn in the case of the predatory sexual conduct of state Assemblyman Vito Lopez, D-Brooklyn, or how the matter was handled by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. And this is exactly what Lopez and Silver, D-Manhattan, want to emphasize. Of course they do. Because getting away with murder without being actually charged with murder is pretty much what Albany World is all about.
At issue is how Silver managed the settlement of complaints by two Lopez staffers. The complaints went away because Silver approved the use of $103,080 in taxpayers’ money in a deal that kept both the complaints and the payments secret. The deal Silver stamped effectively drove the complaints into a dead end, even though the complaints still could have been referred to an ethics panel, Donovan concluded. Silver’s official position is that he did nothing illegal in doing what he says he thought the victims wanted in order to protect their privacy.
Part of the problem with that defense is that Donovan’s investigation found that the confidentiality clause was not requested by the complainants. Instead, it was Lopez who asked for secrecy and Silver’s staff that drafted just such a provision, holding the complainants liable for $10,000 in damages if they talked. Another part of the problem with Silver’s defense is even harder to get around. Quite simply, Lopez, by any reading of the official record, is a pig.
According a report of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Lopez, 71, forced at least four young women in his office to dress for him in specified ways, speak to him in intimate terms, write complimentary notes to him for his files, and rub his hand while he put his hand between a victim’s legs to touch her underwear, among other allegations
Read more at http://www.dailyfreeman.com/articles/2013/05/19/opinion/doc5195386cc048e109675586.txt
