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Ruling: Bar on Media Unjust

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From Bloomberg News

The judge presiding over the obstruction-of-justice trial of former Credit Suisse First Boston banker Frank Quattrone violated the 1st Amendment by barring the news media from publishing juror names, a court ruled.

U.S. Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor, writing on behalf of a three-judge panel of a U.S. appeals court in New York, said nothing in the record of the case justified the order by U.S. District Judge Richard Owen.

“The district court’s order barring publication of jurors’ names not only subjected appellants to a prior restraint of speech, but also infringed their freedom to publish information disclosed in open court,” Sotomayor wrote in the decision made public this week.

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The court’s decision addresses an appeal filed by 12 news organizations and doesn’t affect the conviction of Quattrone, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Quattrone’s first trial ended in a mistrial. Before the retrial, Owen said that he wanted to impose the restraint on the media publication of juror names to avoid a repeat of the mistrial in the prosecution of L. Dennis Kozlowski, ex-chief executive of Tyco International Ltd.

The Kozlowski case ended in a mistrial partly because of published reports about a juror in the case.

Quattrone, 49, is free pending an appeal of his conviction.

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