Judge Joseph Paone on Wednesday denied a motion from Rabbi Osher Eisemann’s lawyers requesting that criminal charges levied against him by prosecutors be tossed over their concealing of exculpatory evidence from the defense team.
Prosecutors were planning to hold a new trial for Rabbi Eisemann after a judge had previously thrown out his convictions over the prosecutors’ shameful and illegal withholding of evidence that would have likely resulted in the jury not convicting him.
With today’s motion denial, the prosecution will move forward with a new trial against Rabbi Eisemann.
Funds to pay for Rabbi Eisemann’s massive defense expenses are desperately needed. Please donate generously at pidyonshvuyim.com
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This is very serious. The only thing that has changed since the jury convicted him was that the bookkeeper said she entered the $200,000 as a loan payoff because something needed to be recorded as the source of the funds.
The government said that Rav Osher shlita knew that there would have to be some record made of the deposit and he planned for it to be written as a loan payoff because basically what else could it be written down as. It wasn’t a donation (it was more than his yearly salarly). So how was the bookkeeper supposed to know that it should be written down to cover an outgoing check that was made out to GZYD if she wasn’t told what it was for? She entered it as what appeared to be a miscellaneous loan because that was the only thing she could do with the information she had.
The government’s claim that they didn’t deliberately hide anything was based on that point. The government said that her testimony about what she did was irrelevant because they never accused Rabbi Eisemann shlita of ordering her to make the supposedly illegal entry. They only accused him of giving the check to her knowing that (without any explanation of what the check was for) the check had to be entered in a way that looked like a loan payoff. Therefore, they felt that her testimony that she entered the check as she did was irrelevant to whether Rabbi Eisemann had wrong intentions, and that’s why they never said that they knew who she was.
The judge accepted the governments explanation of why they concealed the bookkeeper’s identity. That means that he feels there is some logic to that explanation. If a jury thinks along the same lines they could conclude as the previous jury did that based on the evidence that Rabbi Eisemann wanted to do something wrong. That is extremely dangerous, and that’s why we must continue to daven etc. It is a big sakana and our yefillos are needed now more than ever.
R Osher is a tzadik and does not deserve this .
He never took a penny for himself .
If he ever borrowed money from the school it was to
Help needy yidden.
We can only rely on haShem. May He help.