By Matthew Russell Lee
FEDERAL COURTHOUSE, March 6 – When the question of releasing or at least reviewing sealed Jeffrey Epstein documents was taken up by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on March 6, Alan Dershowitz was in the back of the courtroom. Later he moved up, finally tapping his lawyer on the shoulder before his lawyer's two minutes of reserved time.
All of the parties - the Miami Herald's Julie Brown, Mike Cernovich, Alan Dershowitz and even Virginia Giuffre -- were pushing for the unsealing of the documents, except Ghislaine Maxwell. Her lawyer Ty Gee argued that people had relied on the commitment to seal the information. He ended by saying the U.S. judicial system is not about democracy.
But by then the panel of Judges of Cabranes, Pooler and Droney had made it pretty clear they will be remanding the case and the 167 documents back to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The only question seems to be whether Judge Sweet, who initially agreed to seal them, will get the case on remand or if another judge will.
Inner City Press asked Dershowitz, by the elevators after the argument, what he thought of Judge Sweet. He began to say, Judge Sweet made a mistake - when first his lawyer gestured that they should go, and then the clerk of court asked everyone to leave the floor. Dershowitz recounted that he argued his first case in the Second Circuit in 1969. He challenged Giuffre to sue him, and of Judge Cassel was highly critical, a term of art.
Another term of art: slut-shamer, a term applied during the argument to Mike Cernovich but one that the judges mocked, with Judge Pooler asking if there was a "slut-shaming cabal." The wider point was that there is in the United States no system for certifying journalists, that as the Ninth Circuit case Opsidium v Cox has it, journalist is something you do, not something you are.
All citizens - and non citizens, as in the case of Argentines seeking information about their country's debt revealed in a U.S. case - have a right to information, a right that predated the Constitution. The judges reserved judgement. Inner City Press will continue to cover this and other SDNY and 2nd Circuit cases - watch this site.
