Prosecutors and federal judges collaborate with corporations to seal evidence of public safety risks, sentencing hundreds of thousands of Americans to death

When federal prosecutors drag corporations into court for business practices that hurt or even kill people, it's routine for corporate counsel to ask to have the evidence in the case sealed, and for prosecutors to agree, and for judges to rubberstamp the deal, meaning that the public never finds out about the risks around them.

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. Read the rest