Sealed cases

The McClatchy "Suits & Sentences" blog reports today on findings of a federal study on court secrecy. A report prepared for the Federal Judicial Center found 576 sealed civil cases and 1,077 sealed criminal cases in 2006.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in New York (2nd Cir.) last week rejected a request to permanently seal the entire transcript of a criminal defendant’s sentencing.

The appeal remains shrouded in secrecy, with court documents, the charges, the defendant’s name, and even the defense attorney’s name sealed. Prosecutors declined to provide any information about the case, citing the court’s sealing order.

The Justice Department has asked a judge to close a Jan. 7 hearing in the prosecution of five security guards charged with killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians, The National Law Journal reported. The security guards worked for Blackwater Worldwide, now known as Xe, at the time of the shootings.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., today refused The Washington Post’s request to open the pretrial proceedings in the manslaughter prosecution of five security guards who were charged in an attack that left more than a dozen civilians dead in Baghdad.

The security guards were working for Blackwater Worldwide, now known as Xe, in 2007 when they allegedly participated in the unprovoked attack that killed 14 civilians and wounded 20 more.

In a ruling due to be formally published this week, the Connecticut Supreme Court has found that documents filed in more than two dozen civil lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport should be unsealed.

The (Newport, Va.) Virginian-Pilot reports that local judges have been sealing the names of all jurors in all criminal cases since November. The decision was made after the state legislature passed a law last year allowing for such sealing for "good cause."

Chief Circuit Judge Frederick Lowe defended the court's policy."It's an ounce-of-prevention-type thing. . . . Since the statute gave us the authority to do it, we figured we'd do it, mostly for security," he told the paper.

The judge overseeing the high-profile divorce of Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons ruled unconstitutional a statute that automatically sealed divorce cases on the request of either party, the Las Vegas Sun reports.

The Judicial Conference of the United States has adopted a new policy of publicly acknowledging the existence of so-called “super-sealed” cases, Legal Times reports.  

The Judicial Conference is the body that sets policy for the federal courts. Its policies are considered highly persuasive and are often incorporated into local court rules.  

The Cincinnati Enquirer won an Ohio Supreme Court ruling Wednesday that a lower court must decide whether the record of a trial court proceeding was properly sealed.

The appellate court had dismissed the newspaper's case as moot when the records were unsealed. The defendant in the murder case at issue, Michel Veillette, committed suicide while in jail.

A secret foreign intelligence appeals court released a previously sealed decision this week in which the court held constitutional the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ conversations and emails.