merelygifted:

 

Nowhere is this more vivid than in the history of the opioid epidemic, which was first subjected to legal action in 2001, when Purdue Pharma was tried in West Virginia, in a case that revealed that the Oxtcontin manufacturer knew that its products were dangerous, and had gone on to present a fraudulent picture of the safety of opioids in its marketing to doctors and patients.

 

In 2004, Judge Booker T Stephens reviewed this evidence and accepted Purdue’s request to seal it. Purdue settled with prosecutors, but none of the evidence leading to that settlement was made public. The Oxycontin death toll mounted for the next 12 years while, more than a dozen judges repeated Stephens’s sin, hearing and then sealing evidence that the public desperately needed to see. 12 years later, the evidence was leaked to the LA Times. By then, 245,000 Americans had died from opioid overdoses.

 

Reuters has published a must-read report on the widespread practice of sealing court documents relevant to public safety and health in product liability cases, finding that about half of the largest cases heard in the past 20 years had their evidence sealed, in cases involving “drugs, cars, medical devices and other products.” This is just the tip of the iceberg, only tracking federal cases – the problem is likely even worse at the state level.

 

In most states and most federal divisions, the law requires judges to consider requests to keep information sealed, including for reasons of trade secrecy. Judges are supposed to weigh these requests against the public’s right to know, and to publish their reasoning whatever they decide. However, it’s far more common for judges to simply agree with these requests, and then to break the law by failing to publish their judicial opinion on the merits of the plea (“In 85 percent of the cases where Reuters found health and safety information under seal, judges provided no explanation for allowing the secrecy”). Stephens did not publish his reasoning for keeping Purdue’s damning evidence a secret.   …

  

Must be buyin’ off all those ‘judges.’