Corruption

A federal judge in Ohio has granted several news media organizations’ request to unseal hundreds of trial exhibits in the racketeering case of an ex-government official.

But U.S. District Judge Sara Lioi declined to immediately release several other exhibits, including recordings of wiretapped conversations, claiming that doing so could affect the appeal and fair-trial rights of James C. Dimora, who is also a defendant in another criminal case alleging substantially similar conduct.

Ordering lawyers to comply with rules of professional conduct was a less restrictive alternative to issuing a gag order during a high-profile politically charged Alabama gambling-corruption retrial, the presiding judge said in an opinion explaining the rationale for his decision yesterday.

Eight Bell, Calif., city officials were arrested last week on corruption charges after public records requests and a subsequent investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed government corruption and prompted a larger investigation by the Los Angeles County district attorney.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned a $3.5 million defamation verdict against Wilkes-Barre's The Citizens' Voice and ordered a new trial after finding the original trial may have been fixed by two former judges and a reputed crime boss, the Times Leader reported.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered that a hearing be held "as soon as practically possible" to investigate allegations that a judge was improperly assigned a libel lawsuit against a Pennsylvania newspaper that ended with a $3.5 million libel judgment, The Scranton Times-Tribune reports.

A new government investigations board in Wisconsin isn’t releasing the results of most of its inquiries, according to documents provided to The Associated Press.

The AP reported that the state Government Accountability Board, which was created a year ago to investigate government corruption, has only made public the results of 7 out of 29 completed investigations.

According to an indictment laced with allegations of gross governmental overreach into a free press, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich tried to force the Tribune Co. to oust the editorial board of its flagship Chicago newspaper in exchange for state help in a financial deal.

In response to a media group’s push for greater access to a sweeping public corruption investigation in El Paso, Texas, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas agreed Tuesday to make available some redacted transcripts, but opposed any broader order forcing transparency in the case.   

A long-simmering federal inquiry into public corruption in El Paso, Tex. has apparently yielded nine guilty pleas so far. Local attorneys, elected officials and judges have been swept up in the probe. Dozens of search warrants have been served, thousands of dollars seized.

Wiretap surveillance alone lasted two years.  

Asking a court to keep certain documents secret must be done publicly, a San Diego federal judge ordered June 3 in a corruption case involving former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. If a party wishes to file papers in secret, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns said, it must ask to do so openly to give the public the opportunity to oppose the secrecy, citing precedent from the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco.