Sealed cases

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.   

Last month saw Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick trying to force Free Press and Detroit News reporters to testify in the newspapers' Freedom of Information lawsuit against him. 

Parts of more than 2,000 court cases in Oklahoma were sealed between 2003 and 2007, including divorce documents, wrongful death settlements and name changes, according to a sweeping account of court secrecy by the Tulsa World.

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.  

A federal judge in Idaho reversed his own decision closing a sentencing-related hearing today in the case of a man convicted of killing four people, including two children.

A federal appeals court has rejected The Legal Intelligencer 's bid to access the sealed docket and files in a precedent-setting abortion case, in which a woman claims she was wrongfully fired for ending her pregnancy.

Without bothering to detail why, a U.S. district judge in California on Monday barred the public from a hearing in the ongoing dispute between Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and the backers of ConnectU, a rival social network.

When the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia (3rd Cir.) released last month its precedent-setting decision that an employer cannot lawfully fire a woman for terminating her pregnancy, federal courts reporter Shannon P. Duffy of the The Legal Intelligencer was "deeply disturbed."

Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons succeeded in getting a judge to seal his divorce proceedings from the public, but first lady Dawn Gibbons is challenging that order.

In her motion Wednesday, Dawn Gibbons accused the first-term Republican governor of relying on an unconstitutional state law to close the divorce files, in an attempt to hide his involvement with another woman from his constituents.  

The judge in R. Kelly's ongoing criminal trial has refused to allow the media access to documents in the case, citing concerns that doing so could jeopardize Kelly's right to a fair trial.