Government trying to deny Megaupload fair legal representation. The United States government has adopted a take-no-prisoners attitude in its prosecution of Megaupload, seeming to raise every conceivable objection to Megaupload’s efforts to defend itself. We’ve already covered the government’s attempts to block Megaupload from spending money to preserve servers that the company says contains data needed for its defense.
Now, the government has adopted a new tactic: making it as difficult as possible for Megaupload to obtain legal counsel. The prominent law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan has sought permission to represent Megaupload in the case. But in a legal document filed on Wednesday, the government raised several objections to freeing up money to allow the law firm to represent Megaupload in court.
As Quinn Emanuel noted in a Thursday response, the government’s objections are so broad that they would effectively prevent Megaupload from hiring any lawyer with experience litigating major copyright cases. Indeed, they could could make it impossible to hire any lawyer at all. It’s hard to see how Megaupload could get a fair trial if the government’s objections are sustained by the court. [Ars Technica]
From Ars Technica’s coverage of this case, it’s pretty obvious that they’ve never paid any attention to the US legal system before. Everything that’s happening in this case is perfectly normal for a case in a US Federal Court. Megaupload isn’t supposed to get a fair trial–after all, if the government went around giving people fair trials, justice might leak into their legal system and they wouldn’t be able to keep up their 99.5% conviction rate. Nobody who has any say in the matter wants that to happen!
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