Shrimp Boy’ Lawyer Claims Judge Shielded San Francisco Mayor In Corruption Probe

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Publish Date:
January 25, 2016
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San Francisco Public Press
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Summary

The lead attorney for Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, the reputed Chinatown gangster who was convicted of murder and a long list of other crimes two weeks ago, is now alleging that a federal trial judge failed to disclose a conflict of interest, and that he downplayed evidence implicating Mayor Ed Lee in a sprawling public corruption investigation.

In a long-shot bid to overturn Chow’s conviction, lawyer Curtis L. Briggs accused U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer of acting out of bias by withholding documents and secret recordings of the mayor from court while presiding over the trial last year.

Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg said Briggs’s combatively worded filing was a desperate effort to appeal his client’s conviction, and that his claims of bias were “pretty far fetched.” “The main thing is a legal matter,” Weisberg said, “If you don’t have an unbelievably obvious conflict of interest — which this is not — you have to demonstrate that it actually manifested itself in some way.” He said that technically, any conflict of interest would exist for Breyer’s wife and not the judge himself, a subtle but important distinction. Weisberg said that overall Chow and his attorneys “don’t have very good issues on appeal,” and the conviction would likely be upheld.

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