In 1984, Sprizzo heard an
extradition request from the
British government for the return of
Joe Doherty, a member of the
Provisional Irish Republican Army who had killed a British soldier in an ambush in
Northern Ireland, escaped from a prison in
Belfast two days before his conviction and fled to the United States, where he was captured in a
Manhattan bar. Sprizzo ruled that the discipline of the IRA's provisional wing made the killing a political act that was excluded by the extradition treaty between the United States and Britain. A British
Conservative MP Jill Knight called the ruling "a seal of approval to murder, maiming and terrorism". In 1989, Sprizzo issued a scathing criticism of prosecutors in a drug conspiracy case when he dismissed charges against seven defendants. He sealed the court transcripts to keep his remarks out of the newspapers after he berated the prosecutors for their inadequate preparation. But they were released after
The New York Times filed a protest:
Assistant United States Attorney Margaret S. Groban: It just seems a little hard for us that the first time we hear your honor's interpretation of membership is the day when you are going to let heroin traffickers walk out the door.
Judge Sprizzo: Now, wait. You are not going to lay that one on me. You let heroin traffickers out the door by not proceeding in a competent enough fashion to meet the possibility that the judge would not agree with you. . . . Do you know what is wrong with your office, and you in particular? You assume all we have to do is say narcotics.
Groban: That is not true.
Sprizzo: And the judge will roll over and let the case go to the jury. You people have not been trained the way I have been trained, dealing with judges like Judge Wyatt who threw my conspiracy count out, and other judges like Borelli who made the same kind of sophisticated analysis of conspiracy law. Your natural assumption is that we will go in all or nothing because in every case we have gotten away with it. I am telling you that in this case you didn't get away with it. If you had been a competent prosecutor, which you are not, you would have hedged against the possibility that maybe the judge would disagree with you. But it never occurs in the mind of you or anyone in your office that any trial judge will ever disagree with you on the law. Therefore, you do what you want in the face of clear admonitions from the court that these were dice you were rolling. Let's assume I am wrong; let's assume I am erroneous. A competent prosecutor would have hedged against the possibility that the judge might be wrong and decided an issue against the Government, and you put in a separate conspiracy count just to cover that possibility. If these drug dealers are walking free, it is because you did not hedge against that possibility. Don't lay it on my doorstep. I think I am right about the law. But even if I am wrong on the law, if they are walking out of here it is because you people were not competent enough to put in an extra charge in your indictment. Sit down. In 1995, Sprizzo issued a permanent injunction against two
anti-abortion protesters — a retired Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop and a Franciscan friar — who had blocked the entrance to a women's medical clinic in
Dobbs Ferry, New York, on multiple occasions. When the two were arrested in 1996 on similar charges in apparent criminal contempt of the injunction, Sprizzo cleared the men on the basis that they had acted out of religious conviction. ==Death==