[1][2] Sprizzo had served on the Knapp Commission in 1971, responsible for investigating corruption in the New York City Police Department.
[3] Sprizzo was nominated to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by President Ronald Reagan on July 29, 1981, to the seat vacated by Judge Charles Henry Tenney, confirmed by the United States Senate on September 25, 1981, and received his commission on September 28, 1981.
[2] 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.
[5] A British Conservative MP Jill Knight called the ruling "a seal of approval to murder, maiming and terrorism".
[5] Officials from the US Justice Department called the ruling "outrageous" because it made the United States legal system complicit in terrorism.
[6] In 1989, Sprizzo issued a scathing criticism of prosecutors in a drug conspiracy case when he dismissed charges against seven defendants.
[7]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.
[1] Sprizzo acquitted the two men as they had been acting on "sincere, genuine, objectively based" religious convictions, in a decision that The New York Times described as having "startled both sides in the abortion debate".