Legal News

Judge Moreno v. Justice: Putting Plea Agreements Online

By Dan Slater

As journalists — well, bloggers — we’re all for increased transparency and ease of access to information. So, at LBHQ, we’re giving a big thumbs-up to Judge Frederico Moreno, the chief judge of the Southern District of Florida, who, the NLJ reported recently, bucked the wishes of the DOJ and ordered that all plea agreements be posted on online.

In 2007, the Justice Department asked the Judicial Conference to restrict electronic access to plea and cooperation agreements in order to keep information about cooperating witnesses secret. Defense lawyers and First Amendment junkies generally opposed that move.

Moreno’s order rescinds a previous order of April 2007 taking all plea agreements offline and making them accessible for physical viewing only at the courthouse. For more on the controversial online plea agreements issue, go to Doug Berman’s Sentencing Law & Policy blog.

“The sense of the Court is that the public’s interest in access must prevail in this instance and that restricting access to all plea agreements is overly broad,” states Moreno’s order. “Other means are available to the prosecution and defense to insure that the public record does not contain information about cooperation agreements in those instance where the interests of safety or other considerations require different treatment.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 03, 2009 (boomark / email).