No rush to judgment

Joe Battenfeld seems perturbed that city officials, indicted by the feds, are continuing to collect their salaries while awaiting trial (“$200G and growing: City Hall aides still paid as trial awaits,” May 25). Cutting off salaries of indicted officials — who are, after all, presumed innocent unless and until convicted by a jury — is a form of prejudging a case that helps assure a conviction, since a defendant is deprived of his wherewithal to pay for legal counsel in order to prove his innocence.

It is especially inappropriate to be prejudging an indicted city aide when one looks at the sorry record of federal prosecutors nationwide, including here in Boston, in trying to twist ordinary (even if unsavory to some reporters and columnists) political activities into federal felonies. I would have thought that by now the Boston media would have learned a lesson from the local federal court of appeals’ reversal of the state Probation Department indictees’ conviction on the grounds that what they did simply did not constitute a felony.

It is especially inappropriate to prejudge political officials such as Timothy Sullivan and Kenneth Brissette, who have not even been accused of lining their own pockets. — Harvey Silverglate, Cambridge The writer is a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer.