Judge declines to open recordings in DUI case
MIAMI (AP) – Sean Casey admits having several drinks the night of a fatal accident in 2001. Somewhere around his last rum and Coke, while watching the sun rise at a Miami beach bar, he says he blacked out. Everything after that is a blur.
He doesn’t remember driving home, only waking up in his apartment. But someone slammed Casey’s black BMW into 71-year-old Mary Montgomery as she crossed the street, killing her. Authorities found the car abandoned, its tags leading them to Casey. They charged him with DUI manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter and leaving the scene of a crime.
A few years later, he fled the country before his trial, claiming his lawyer, a big-time attorney now running for judge, told him to leave instead of taking the chance he could go to prison.
Casey says he has the recordings to prove it, but Florida is among several states where it is generally illegal to record someone without their knowledge.
On Tuesday, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge John Thornton ruled that the transcripts of those recordings will remain sealed, saying they were made illegally because they were secretly recorded. The judge also found no evidence that attorney Milton Hirsch committed a criminal act.
The judge called the tapes contraband. Casey and his lawyers maintain Florida’s statute is flawed and that regardless of how recordings are made, they should be allowed as evidence because they show a crime has been committed.
Casey said in a jailhouse interview this week that his former attorney, Milton Hirsch, told him “that he wished I could disappear, to get out of harm’s way. He said prison is not a place for you. Prison is a place with big muscle guys.”
Casey also claims his legal psychologist, Dr. Michael Rappaport, told him to leave the country before the trial, telling him “most of the people who leave the country don’t get caught. And there aren’t DUI gay guys from Miami on Interpol’s list.”