“The defendants here are not entitled to release pending appeal…based on their novel, but unsupported and overreaching arguments,” Bennett said in his 46-page decision released yesterday.
Now serving their sentences in federal prisons, Villagomez, his sister Joaquina V. Santos, and her husband, former Commerce Secretary James A. Santos, have filed a joint renewed motion for release from custody pending the appeal they filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
On Feb. 28, 2010, then-Judge Alex R. Munson denied their motions for release pending appeal, saying their claims regarding jury misconduct were “not fairly debatable.”
Bennett said: “Undaunted, the defendants now rely on a ‘bigger hammer,’ a contention that a recent [U.S.] Supreme Court decision, Presley v. Goergia, establishes they have a fairly debatable claim that their Sixth Amendment right to a public trial was violated when the trial court refused to open to the general public unoccupied seats in the courtroom reserved for visiting students.”
But Bennett said adopting the defendants’ position “would result in a wholesale reversal or rejection of decades of Supreme Court and lower federal court precedent on the meaning of ‘closure’ of a trial.”
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