AP has just put this out:
AP: Many Defendants' Cases Kept Secret
Despite the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of public trials, nearly all records are being kept secret for more than 5,000 defendants who completed their journey through the federal courts over the last three years.
Instances of such secrecy more than doubled from 2003 to 2005.
The article goes on to say that most of these cases are drug-related, and part of the reason the trials are secret is because collaborating witnesses are themselves unsavory characters.
...but the public cannot learn whether their testimony against confederates won them drastically reduced prison sentences or even freedom.
Only a "small number" are related to terrorism but
...the secrecy has reached another level -- the use of secret dockets. For hundreds of such defendants over the past few years in this city [DC], should someone acquire the actual case number for them and enter it in the U.S. District Court's computerized record system, the computer will falsely reply, "no such case" -- rather than acknowledging that it is a sealed case.
There's more but the heart of it to my mind is
...these figures include an unknown number of sealed indictments that will be made public if arrests are made.
"That's horrifying," said Loyola's Levenson. "When I was a prosecutor from 1981 to 1989, I never heard of secret dockets."
No matter how few turn out to be almost totally sealed after the defendant's case was completed, "it's still significant," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee and a pioneer in campaigning against court secrecy.
"The Supreme Court has said that criminal proceedings are public," Dalglish added. "In this country, we don't prosecute and lock up convicts and have no public track record of how we got there. That violates the defendants' rights not to mention the public's right to know what it's court system is doing."
The assault on the Constitution is vast and omni-directional. One more instance of it here. The question is, if we are told there is a certain number of cases that are conducted in secret, and another number that is secret even from basic record-keeping procedures, let alone witnesses and transcripts...
Well, how many cases are even more secret than that?
Incidentally, I just can't resist mocking the whole "poll" thing once again, so let's see if this works...