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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (25864)	4/17/2008 1:35:49 PM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 224728

The prosecutor hoisted ex-mayor on his own words Thursday, April 17, 2008 She had them at "thievery." It was the first word prosecutor Judith Germano uttered in her five-hour closing last week -- a one-word master stroke that gave jurors a simple way of wrapping up all the conflicting testimony and all the confusing documents and giving it all a name. Advertisement Thievery. A word that led them to their surprising guilty verdicts yesterday. "I thought of using it early on," Germano said moments after the jury ended the trial of former Newark mayor Sharpe James and his one-time lover Tamika Riley. At first blush, an odd choice, because neither James nor Riley was charged with theft, but with fraud. And it was not even a word the young government attorney herself coined to characterize events in Newark. It was Sharpe James' word, and it impaled him. "I thought it would be appropriate to use his own words to describe him." The genius of the ploy: She used a speech given by James himself in 2004, when he pressed in Trenton for a law to limit the power of city councils to sell city-owned land. The government had argued James, as state senator, sponsored the law to help Riley -- a contention that bordered on the implausible. But that wasn't the point of why Germano used his Senate speech. She used it to show just how slimy Newark politics was, and she put James smack in the middle of the municipal mud -- a man, who, as he believed of his council antagonists, had larceny as well as lust in his heart and on his mind. This is what James said -- and what Germano read to the jury: CONTINUED 1 \| 2 \| 3 Next nj.com