LA COURTHOUSE, July 24 – United States v.
Palermo is the federal case arising from the June 8, 2025
alleged attack on California Highway Patrol officers
trapped beneath the Main Street overpass on the 101
Freeway during Los Angeles's anti-ICE protests.
Prosecutors say the defendants lit
cardboard, vegetation, and fireworks on fire and dropped
them onto CHP vehicles below, setting one ablaze. A
Superseding Indictment in November 2025 brought the total
to nine defendants, all now before Judge John F. Walter.
Six defendants have pleaded guilty this
spring, including Roldan, to misdemeanor simple assault,
capped at one year. Sentencing is now underway case by
case, with real disagreement over the numbers — Roldan's
own sentencing memorandum seeks roughly 18 months'
equivalent relief, while DOJ has pressed for far longer
terms for co-defendants facing the felony counts.
On July 13, Roldan obtained a same-day
order sealing Exhibit C to his sentencing memorandum — no
public reasoning, no findings, nothing. Inner City Press
does not know what the exhibit contains and does not
speculate here.
What is known is the law, confirmed by Lee
v Greenwood in the Second Circuit: sentencing exhibits are
judicial documents at the heart of the presumption of
public access, because they help determine how long
someone goes to prison for a case that began with a
protest against federal immigration enforcement and ended
with a burning patrol car. Under Ninth Circuit precedent,
sealing requires compelling reasons and specific findings
— not silence, and not an unreasoned same-day order.
So Inner City Press moved to intervene,
asking the Court to unseal the order and require a
redacted public version of the exhibit if genuine
sensitivities exist within it.
On July 16 Inner City Press' motion to
unseal was docketed
as Dkt. No. 356 in the Roldan/Palermo case -
followed by a notice, not from the judge, about proper
parties. So it was resubmitted personally, amid this:
"SENTENCING held before Judge John F. Walter. Defendant, Ronald Alexis Coreas is hereby placed on probation on Count 1 of the First Superseding Information for a term of 4 years. Special assessment $25. Restitution $126,707.62. All fines waived. On the Government's Motion, the Court orders the underlying First Superseding Indictment dismissed as to this defendant only."
On July 24: Judge John F. Walter
ruled on Inner City Press's motion to unseal sentencing
materials in United States v. Roldan. The ruling is a
split decision, and the more important half of it is the
one that got less attention in the order itself: Judge
Walter granted intervention. Citing San Jose Mercury
News, Inc. v. U.S. District Court, the Ninth Circuit's
foundational case on press standing to challenge sealing,
Judge Walter held that "intervention for the limited
purpose of asserting the public's qualified right of
access to judicial records is appropriate," and granted
it. That is not a formality. It is a federal judge
confirming, on the record, that a journalist — not a party
to the underlying criminal case, appearing pro se, filing
through the court's electronic submission system rather
than a law firm — has standing to be heard on what the
public may see.
This is the same result Connecticut,
Maryland, Colorado, Massachusetts, and the Eastern
District of New York have reached this year through Inner
City Press' letters and motions; here it came through the
Central District's own EDSS portal, with the caption
itself corrected to reflect that the motion was filed by
the individual journalist all along.
Having granted standing, the Court declined
to grant the relief. Exhibit C, Judge Walter found,
consists "primarily of Defendant's confidential
substance-use disorder treatment records and other
protected health information," submitted to help the Court
weigh the sentencing factors under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) —
Roldan's history, his need for treatment, his prospects
for rehabilitation. The Court found that disclosure would
reveal "intimate personal information having minimal value
to the public's understanding" of the sentencing decision,
while creating real risk of "unnecessary embarrassment,
stigma, and lasting invasion" of medical privacy, and
cited the federal policy favoring confidentiality of
substance-use treatment records specifically. Inner
City Press respectfully takes a different view of where
that balance sits, though a narrower one than the ruling
might suggest. Sentencing records that speak to a
defendant's need for treatment are, in the ordinary case,
exactly the kind of material courts routinely protect
through redaction rather than wholesale sealing — the
diagnosis and treatment history redacted, the fact and
general nature of the mitigating circumstance left
visible, so the public can still see what the Court
weighed even if not the clinical detail behind it. The
order does not explain why that middle path was
unavailable here, or why an entire exhibit, rather than
the specific medical particulars within it, needed to be
withheld. That is a real question, even from a ruling that
got the harder question — standing — right. It is
worth saying plainly: this is the kind of case where
reasonable people, and reasonable judges, can disagree
about exactly where compassion for a defendant's recovery
and the public's right to understand a federal sentencing
decision should draw the line. Judge Walter drew it
further toward privacy than Inner City Press argued for.
He did not, however, treat the argument as unworthy of
being heard, or the party making it as lacking standing to
make it — and that, this year, has not been a given.
Inner City Press will be back — in
the Central District of California, and in the other
districts where this same question keeps arising. Watch
this site.
Watch this site.
