Hypocrisy rarely gets any more blatant than it did earlier this week when infamous class-action lawsuit king William Lerach — an admitted felon in a vast criminal racketeering case involving more than $11 million in kickbacks to favored plaintiffs — filed court documents asking for the legal brief and 150 supporting letters about his criminal sentencing to be kept under seal. The material is being used by Judge John Walter to determine how much time Lerach will spend in federal prison. He will hear Walter’s decision later this month.
Lerach is the man who has banked tens of millions of dollars through securities class-action lawsuits against corporations and executives, often filed without any evidence of wrongdoing and based merely on what he called his own internal “X-ray vision.” His wondrous vision supposedly allowed him to find corporate wrongdoing where nobody else saw anything but bad market conditions. Then, using variations of the argument that no internal, private corporate record is ever off limits to the crusading Lerach, he would “always find a document to incriminate them.” (Never mind, say multiple detractors, that the “incrimination” often amounted to portraying the documents wildly out of context.) Yet now we see that this same lawyer, who regularly insisted on the right to what amounts to fishing expeditions without a single shred of proof, insisting that documents concerning his own felony conviction should be secret.
Lerach’s argument is that the documents at issue “contain personal and sensitive information about Mr. Lerach and about those who wrote them.” As if Lerach ever before evinced a concern for “personal and sensitive information,” even for innocent people. Even in this instance, though, prosecutors are cutting Lerach some slack. Exercising discretion and sensitivity far beyond what Lerach usually shows, they have offered to allow a seal on 22 of the 150 documents in order to keep truly personal matters … well, personal. But as they argue in their brief against sealing the whole raft of documents, “the vast majority of the information submitted discuss defendant’s abilities as an attorney; his accomplishments; and various charitable contributions made by the defendant.”
Surely the public has a right to know what factors might weigh on a judge’s decision on how harshly to sentence somebody convicted of one of the legal system’s biggest illegal conspiracies in memory. Last we checked, something called the First Amendment gives the public the right to open government. That’s why, in the end, this attempt to put a lid on public information isn’t just about William Lerach. It’s about equal justice for all, and about the integrity of our court system — the same court system that Lerach abused for a full quarter-century. The court should keep all of the documents open to the public.
