Douglas P. Woodlock

In 1989, Woodlock presided over a lawsuit brought by Jugoplastika, a Yugoslavian basketball team, against the Boston Celtics. Jugoplastika brought the suit after the Celtics had drafted basketball player Dino Radja, alleging that Radja still had two years remaining on a 1988 contract with Jugoplastika. Woodlock issued a preliminary injunction barring Radja from playing for the Celtics for two years.[12] In October 1989, the Celtics and the Jugoplastika reached a settlement, under which the Celtics partially bought out Radja's contract with Jugoplastika, so that Radja would play for Jugoplastika during the 1989–90 season, but could play for the Celtics starting in the 1990–91 season.[13]

In a 1995 suit under the Alien Tort Claims Act, Woodlock ordered Hector Gramajo, a former Guatemalan general and defense minister, to pay $47.5 million in damages to nine plaintiffs, for his role in overseeing a campaign of repression and human rights abuses during the Guatemalan Civil War.[14] The plaintiffs were eight Gutamalean Canjobal indigenous people and American nun Dianna Ortiz, who brought claims for human rights violations that included the razing of Canjobal villages and the torture of Ortiz. In his ruling, Woodlock wrote: "Gramajo was aware of and supported widespread acts of brutality committed under his command resulting in thousands of civilian deaths. The evidence suggests that Gramajo devised and directed the implementation of an indiscriminate campaign of terror against civilians."[14][15]

In 2008, Woodlock presided over a case involving the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), in which he issued an injunction barring three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from disclosing security vulnerabilities in the MBTA's CharlieCard system; the decision was controversial, and resulting press attention resulted in further publicity of the security lapse.[10]

Woodlock was the judge who presided over litigation between the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, an anti-poverty group, and the Town of Framingham and its officials. The Opportunity Council filed suit in 2007, alleging that the town government had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and federal fair housing laws by, among other things, delaying the permitting process for the construction of housing for recovering drug addicts and homeless veterans.[16] In September 2010, Woodlock issued a lengthy opinion denying the town's motion to dismiss the suit,[16][17] and the parties reached a settlement the following month, in which the Town paid $1 million and agreed to have officials undergo civil rights training.[16]

In 2011, Woodlock dismissed an attempt by the Winklevoss twins and their partner Divya Narendra to reopen litigation on their claims related to Facebook; the Winklevosses had settled their claims in a $65 million settlement in 2008.[18]

In 2020, Woodlock issued a preliminary order directing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to allow gun stores (but not shooting ranges) to reopen, overruling Governor Charlie Baker's executive order to the extent it excluded gun retailers from a list of essential retailers permitted to remain open during the coronavirus pandemic.[19] Applying intermediate scrutiny to the Second Amendment question, Woodlock found that the commonwealth had failed to establish "a substantial fit between the goals of the emergency declared by the commonwealth and the burdening of the constitutional rights," noting that liquor stores were deemed essential but gun retailers were not.[19] The judge's order did require gun shops who reopened to follow a ten-point plan adopted by the state to limit the spread of the virus, including social distancing requirements, sales by appointment only, wearing of masks by employees and customers, and sanitation requirements.[19]

Woodlock has presided over a number of noteworthy criminal cases. In 2005, Woodlock accepted a plea agreement between federal prosecutors and Ahmed F. Mehalba, a translator at the detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, who pleaded guilty to removing a disc containing classified documents from the base. Woodlock sentenced Mehalba to 20 months in prison.[20] In 2010, Woodlock sentenced computer hacker Albert Gonzalez to 20 years and one day in prison,[21] after Gonzalez pleaded guilty the previous year to hacking Heartland Payment Systems' corporate computer system as part of a scheme to steal millions of payment card numbers.[21][22]

In 2010, Woodlock accepted the guilty plea of Dianne Wilkerson, a former member of the Massachusetts Senate who pleaded guilty to attempted extortion and admitted that she had accepted bribes,[23] and the next year, Woodlock sentenced her to three and a half years in prison.[24] Also in 2011, Woodlock sentenced former Boston city councilor Chuck Turner to three years in prison for accepting a $1,000 bribe, citing Turner's false statements to the FBI and "ludicrously perjurious testimony" as reasons for the sentence.[25] In 2012, Woodlock sentenced Catherine E. Greig, the longtime companion of Boston organized crime figure James "Whitey" Bulger, to eight years in jail. Greig pleaded guilty to harboring Bulger while he was a fugitive from justice.[26] The sentence was affirmed on appeal.[27] In 2014, Woodlock oversaw the criminal proceedings against two friends of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who were convicted of obstruction of justice for destroying evidence and lying to authorities who were investigating the crime.[7] In 2019, Woodlock was the judge assigned to the criminal case against Jeffrey Bizzack, a California businessman who was one of many parents charged in the Varsity Blues admissions bribery scandal. Bizzack pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud in connection with a scheme to get his son admitted to the University of Southern California as a fake recruited athlete; Woodlock sentenced Bizzack to two months in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine.[28][29][30]