Feds May Block Pacer To Protect Snitches

In the last three years, nearly 700 witnesses and informants have been threatened, wounded, or killed, leading the federal judiciary to consider blocking public access to criminal records within Pacer. In April, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan told the Judicial Conference’s criminal rules committee in April that Pacer was part of the problem. “Anonymous remote public access to PACER is a source of much of the information that gets into prisons about who is cooperating,” Kaplan said, according to a Wall Street Journal account. Other ideas include sealing prosecutors’ motions for reduced sentences that could reveal government cooperation, or to change the way that dockets are publicly displayed to make it more difficult to distinguish the cases in which a defendant is cooperating. But, criminal defense lawyers argue, that would also make it difficult to obtain the information they need to raise questions about informants. “It hamstrings the defense not being able to understand who the witnesses are against the defendant and what their motivations are,” Barry Pollack, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told the Journal.