LOS ANGELES (AP) - A former federal court employee in Los Angeles has been sentenced to six months in prison for accessing and leaking confidential information to tip off suspected criminals, including Armenian Power gang members.
Federal prosecutor Martin Estrada says Nune Gevorkyan also received three years of probation at sentencing on Wednesday. Her husband, Oganes Koshkaryan, was sentenced to 57 months in prison. The pair pleaded guilty earlier this year to conspiracy and other charges.
Gevorkyan worked as a clerk where criminal documents are filed and looked at sealed indictments before raids on Armenian Power associates across Southern California in February 2011.
Koshkaryan acted as an intermediary, selling information his wife collected in exchange for cash.
A records search revealed Gevorkyan had accessed sealed court documents in at least two ongoing investigations.
Senior Analyst Nikolai Fedotov, InfoWatch comments:
«It is important to understand that the United States Court deals with crime investigations, in contrast to Russia, where cases come to court fully investigated. Thus they don’t contain the secrecy of the investigation, and criminals are not interested in them.
In Russia, court staff have deal with another aspect of data protection – it isn’t with privacy, but with accessibility. The destruction of the criminal case, or even its individual pages, must get defendant free from imprisonment by law. Such cases really took place in the liberal days of Boris Yeltsin».
