by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack
SDNY COURTHOUSE, Dec 9 – When Broadway producer Ben Sprecher was brought on child porn charges into the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Magistrates Court on August 19, 2019, Inner City Press was there and asked his lawyer questions (which went unanswered).
Sprecher subsequent was sentenced only to probation - so much for mandatory minimums for this crime - and now in December 2023, Sprecher is asking for early termination of his probation.
But Sprecher has made his entire memo and exhibit sealed - not even in the SDNY docket. To its credit, in this one case, the US Attorney's Office on December 8 in a footnote asked that Sprecher "be directed to file a public version of the Motion and exhibits, with narrowly tailored redactions and sealing requests."
But this same US Attorney's Office, when in September 2023 OneCoin cryptocurrency fraud defendant Karl Sebastian Greenwood sealed all of his sentencing letters and Inner City Press opposed it, "took no position" - and SDNY Judge Edgardo Ramos recited that in an order keeping all the letters sealed.
Judge Ramos wrote, Docket 574, that "The Government takes no position. The Court finds that unsealing is not warranted in that the redactions in the Defendant's sending submission are appropriately limited to Defendant and his family's medical information, his family's identities and personal information, and other similarly protected information."
But the entirety of each and every letter was sealed.
Inner City Press has appealed that to the Second Circuit, at much sacrifice. The US Attorney's Office is a party to that appeal. How can they justify affirmative seeking unsealing in one case, and colluding in total sealing on another, about OneCoin's Greenwood. We will be asking.
For now, Inner City Press on December 8 filed a letter to fully unseal Sprecher's filings to SDNY Judge J. Paul Oetken, sending a copy to the US Attorney's Office, the same one sealing Greenwood.
The appeal is (still) US v. Scott, et al., 23-7432 (appeal from 17-cr-630-ER)
Sprecher's case is US v. Sprecher, 19-cr-749 (Oetken)
More - on how and why this system is broken - on Substack here
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