Shira Scheindlin - Important Cases

Important Cases

During her tenure, Scheindlin has presided over a number of high profile cases, many of which advanced important new positions in the interpretation of the United States Constitution or federal law.

• In April 2002, in the case United States v. Osama Awadallah, after Awadallah testified before a grand jury that he had met with two of the September 11, 2001 hijackers, but could not remember their names, Scheindlin dismissed a perjury charge against him and found that Awadallah's prolonged detention without actual criminal charges was based on misrepresentations and omissions by the government and could not be justified under existing law. Her decision was later reversed on appeal.
• In February 2004 in the case Maurice Clarett v. National Football League, Scheindlin, accepting the antitrust-law arguments raised by lawyer Alan C. Milstein, ruled that the NFL could not bar Clarett from participating in the 2004 NFL Draft. This decision was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the case was not heard by the Supreme Court.
• In April 2004, in the case Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, Scheindlin sanctioned UBS for not being able to complete their E-Discovery of potentially informative documents, and not complying with their litigation hold on the destruction of documents. This case has been seen as revolutionary in the legal realms of human resources and computer forensics, as the burden of proof was effectively shifted to the defendant for their inability to produce documents in a timely manner, and the presentation to the jury of an adverse inference.
• Judge Scheindlin presided over three trials of John Gotti Jr. ("Junior"), each of which ended in a mistrial due to a deadlocked jury. The principal charge against Gotti in the trials was racketeering conspiracy stemming from Gotti's alleged management of the Gambino crime family following the incarceration and death of his father, John Gotti Sr. (the "Dapper Don"). "On September 20, 2005, the jury acquitted him of securities fraud and hung 11-1 for conviction on racketeering charges that included the assault on Sliwa. His re-trial on the remaining charges the following March also ended in a mistrial, with the jury hung 8-4 for acquittal. At the third trial involving the Sliwa assault, prosecutors convinced 12 jurors that Junior had ordered the kidnapping but failed to convince them that he had engaged in criminal activity after 1999 and the jury again deadlocked on the racketeering charges, this time voting 8-4 for conviction."
• In September 2006 Scheindlin ruled that Judith Clark, a Weather Underground radical serving 75 years to life for the murder of a Brinks guard and two police officers during a robbery, was entitled to a new trial because her Sixth Amendment right to counsel was violated. Scheindlin found Clark's right to counsel was violated even though the then-self-proclaimed revolutionary insisted on representing herself at trial, turned down legal counsel, boycotted much of the trial and refused to recognize the court's authority. In January 2008 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed Scheindlin's ruling and held that Clark was not denied her right to counsel because Clark "knowingly and intelligently exercised her constitutional right to make those choices."
• In January 2009, Judge Scheindlin ruled in SEC v Collins & Aikman, a case which addresses discovery obligations of the Government in civil litigation. The case opines that the government was obliged to search its own electronic data to produce responsive documents (versus providing a 10-million page data dump), submit materials allegedly covered by the deliberative process privilege to the Court for in camera review, and search its e-mail and attachments after cooperating with the plaintiff in the negotiation of an appropriate search protocol “designed to retrieve responsive information without incurring an unduly burdensome expense disproportionate to the size and needs of the case.” Notably, Judge Scheindlin finds in this case that the burden rests with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to provide to the defendant the compilation of documents that support the allegations in the Complaint, rather than passing the burden to the defendant to come up with “appropriate” search terms, especially since “the inaccuracy of such searches is by now relatively well known.” (In Footnote 39, she references TREC Legal Track and other studies that research and report on different search methodologies.) She concluded in this case that a government agency is subject to the “same discovery rules that govern private parties (albeit with the benefit of additional privileges such as deliberative process and state secrets)” thus ordering the SEC to produce documents as requested by the plaintiff.
• In 2011 Judge Scheindlin presided over the trial of accused (and convicted) arms trafficker Viktor Bout.