Dan Christensen
Staff Writer
Miami Daily Business Review

Citation
Dan Christensen’s reporting on the suppression of all public record of federal court cases in the U.S. District Court of South Florida is a model of sharp instincts, courageous pursuit, and fearless reporting. Working his beat for the Miami Daily Business Review, Christensen exposed how federal judges had imposed, without explicit statutory or policy authority, information blackouts that hid the very existence of veiled cases. The habeas corpus petition of an Algerian immigrant held for five months in a post-9.11 roundup was sealed and wiped from the public record. The defendant in a narcotics trial was prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned in total secrecy. In a period of new challenges to civil liberties and transparency in the wielding of state power, Dan Christensen has demonstrated the power of one committed reporter to unveil truth and forcefully illuminate an issue of high public interest.

Excerpt
Secrecy Within
March 12, 2003
With war in Iraq looming, the largely invisible U.S. campaign against terror being waged in the nation’s federal courts surfaced in extraordinary ways in Miami last week.
A published court calendar for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was obliterated to omit the names of litigants in a sealed civil case brought by an Algerian man the Daily Business Review has learned was among 1,200 young Arab and Muslim men secretly detained in the post-Sept. 11 nationwide dragnet.
Later, the appellate court’s computer records were altered to remove any information about the case, No. 02-11060.
In between, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit closed its courtroom last Wednesday to the public and the press to hear arguments in the sealed case….
In another case, the U.S. attorney’s office has taken secret steps to remove from the public record any trace of a habeas corpus case brought by a stateless Palestinian man from Sunrise who’s fighting deportation after being labeled a “terrorist” by an immigration judge last year.
The matter is so sensitive that even the government’s motion to seal is sealed…
Defense attorneys across the nation have complained about being hamstrung by the Justice Department’s aggressive assertion of secrecy in both criminal and civil court proceedings that have arisen from the investigation of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Biography
Dan Christensen covers federal courts and writes a weekly news column for the 9,200-circulation Miami Daily Business Review— part of American Lawyer Media's New York-based newspaper group. He's been a reporter in South Florida for more than 25 years. In 2002, Christensen was a finalist in the Investigative Reporters and Editors national awards competition for stories that led to federal indictments against numerous Miami police officers involved in a deadly gun-planting conspiracy. Before joining the Review in 1989, Christensen was a general assignment reporter with investigative reporting duties at The Miami News. Earlier, he worked as a staff writer at what is today the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Christensen grew up in Hillsdale, N.J. and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.