A recent, high-profile insider trading case raises an interesting question concerning how judges are assigned to criminal cases in the Southern District of New York.
Unlike most other criminal defendants in this district, former SAC Capital executive Michael Steinberg was not assigned to a judge through “the wheel”—the mechanism designed to assure that judicial assignments in new criminal cases are random.1 Instead, the U.S. Attorney’s Office took steps to channel Steinberg’s case to a judge who had already handled a similar case involving some of the same facts and issues. Rather than charging Steinberg in a new indictment, which would have triggered a random assignment, the Office chose instead to charge him under a “superseding” indictment, which meant that his case would automatically revert to the judge who handled the case in which an earlier indictment had issued.2
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