Boston Globe

12/06/05

In 1987, Samuel A. Alito Jr., then the US attorney for the district of New Jersey, signed a bank fraud indictment of a New Jersey man named Larry Kopp. Later, when Alito became a federal appeals judge, he put the Kopp case on his 'standing recusal' list, seeking to uphold his promise that he would disqualify himself from any case that he had supervised as US attorney. But in 1992, Alito was noted as 'present' in the court's final decision in the Kopp case, in which the vacating of Kopp's sentence was upheld. If Alito did take part, it would appear to be a fourth instance in which the Supreme Court pick was recorded as being in a case he had promised to avoid. The chief judge of the appeals court, Anthony J. Scirica, said in a telephone interview that the clerk should have kept Alito from considering the case, and that there was no way to know from the record whether he had participated...

http://tinyurl.com/cswkp


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp