New York is ramping up privacy protections for judges and their families at a time when former President Donald Trump’s court trials in Manhattan have helped make some of those people targets of a wave of threats.
“We can't live in a vacuum,” said state Assemblymember Charles Lavine, a Nassau County Democrat who sponsored the measure before it made itlast month. “We know that the former president has done everything he can to gin up public support to hate judges, prosecutors, lawyers and even jurors.” Meanwhile, judges presiding over several trials in Manhattan against Trump have faced a barrage of threats and negative comments. In February, someone sent an envelope filled with, the state judge who oversaw a civil trial regarding Trump’s finances. Court Officer-Captain Charles Hollon said in a court filing last fall that the judge received a stream of “harassing and disparaging comments and threats” before the trial and that they “increased exponentially” once the proceedings began.
That was the case in March, when a Buffalo-area man was arrested for sending death threats to Engoron and state Attorney General Letitia James, who had brought a civil lawsuit against Trump.Justice Verna L. Saunders, president of the Association of Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, which advocates for state judges, praised the new law. She also asked lawmakers to add others who work in the court system to the protections.
While the new law includes a caveat that allows the information to be disseminated for reporting and newsgathering meant to “inform the public on matters of public interest or public concern,” Grayson Clary, staff attorney at the Reporters Committee, said that’s insufficient. “If there's nowhere to learn these facts in the first place, if all the sources for this kind of information dry up, then you're not going to see any reporting driven by it downstream,” he said.
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