Attorneys for former Chicago Ald. Ed Burke seek to get some of his convictions overturned
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Former Chicago political powerhouse Edward Burke was back in court Wednesday.
Lawyers for the 80-year-old former 14th Ward alderman, City Council Finance Committee chairman, and mayoral candidate asked a judge to throw out most of the guilty verdicts a jury came back with last year.
These are long-shot political moves aimed at trying to knock down convictions that are likely to put Burke behind bars for the rest of his life. A jury found Burke applied political pressure to help not just anyone – but mostly people from whom he was trying to land lucrative private law work.
Burke appeared in court wearing a green tie, with his wife Anne by his side.
The acquittal and re-trial requests filed by his attorneys deal with three of the four schemes a jury says Burke orchestrated.
One of those schemes is the pressure Burke applied to try and get his goddaughter a paid position at the Field Museum of Natural History. While money is something that is transferable, Burke's team argued, a job is not.
Burke's team cited the federal case against former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, where the topic of a job as an asset was litigated when Blagojevich tried to secure a board position for himself in exchange for naming a replacement for then-President-elect Barack Obama's U.S. Senate seat.
The second set of convictions that Burke's lawyers challenged concerns Burke's efforts to help green light permits to renovate Chicago's Old Post Office. They say Burke made casual calls to help get permits, but these were not "official acts" as a matter of law. Instead, attorneys alleged, they were casual requests.
This was the same argument made with the third scheme - Burke's efforts to smooth out problems to get a Binny's liquor store sign put up in the Portage Park neighborhood.
Burke's team is not challenging the convictions related to the so-called Burger King scheme, in which Burke threw roadblocks in the way of Burger King franchisees who never used Burke's law firm.
Burke is due back in court in two weeks.
U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall has not ruled on Burke's team's requests for re-trial or acquittal.
This effort was not an appeal. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will hear any arguments from Burke's team only after a sentence is handed down by the judge whose been hearing the case.
