George Mitchell can have access to the names of baseball players who may have been implicated in drug use by former Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski, but the public will not.
U.S. District Judge Thomas C. Platt of the Eastern District of New York denied Friday the San Francisco Chronicle and Albany Times-Union’s motion to unseal the redacted names of as many as 23 baseball players that appeared in a plea agreement filed in April by Radomski, who pleaded guilty to steroid distribution and money laundering. The sealed records included a list of “MLB-associated” people who had written checks to Radomski and were thought to be his drug customers.
Part of Radomski’s agreement stated that he would be required to cooperate with the government on an ongoing basis and to cooperate with Mitchell, a private citizen who is conducting an investigation into steroid use in baseball at the behest of Commissioner Bud Selig.
Platt did not address the Chronicle and Times-Union’s primary argument that if Mitchell had a right to the names or information about them, the public should too.
The newspapers based their argument on First Amendment and federal common-law rights of access to publicly filed judicial documents, both of which were denied by Platt, as was a request for oral arguments.
Citing the government’s reliance on “ongoing investigations,” the court wrote that “these investigations continue to rely on the cooperation of Mr. Radomski … and continue to rely on the cooperation of third parties whose names have been redacted in the affidavit and who have already been contacted by the government.”
The court added that the government “may have relied on and may continue to rely on the cooperation of third parties who are not named in the affidavit but who are otherwise linked to the redacted information.”
The ruling was the second in the last six weeks to deny the public access to names involved in a baseball drug probe. A federal judge in Phoenix ruled in July that the Associated Press was not entitled to the redacted names from an affidavit concerning Jason Grimsley from 2005.
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