Word: criminalled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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So it came as a stunning shock to many last week when the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, ruled that the public has no constitutional right under the "public trial" guarantee of the Sixth Amendment to attend criminal trials. The ruling undercuts a fundamental assumption of...
The case, Gannett Co. vs. DePasquale, arose from a routine suppression-of-evidence hearing before a murder trial in upstate New York in 1976. Two men charged with murdering an ex-policeman named Wayne Clapp had come to court trying to block the prosecution from using confessions and a murder...
Writing for the high court's majority, Justice Potter Stewart acknowledged that there is a "strong societal interest" in open trials. But he left for another day the question whether judges must weigh that interest against the defendant's right to a fair trial. The Sixth Amendment'...
The high court's majority opinion was hedged by the concurring opinions o Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Lewis Powell. In Burger's view, the decision applies only to pretrial hearings not to trials themselves. That is not a great limitation, however, since about 90% of all...
Justice William Rehnquist, who also concurred, would go much further: defendants, prosecutors and judges should be free to bar press and public from any trial for any reason they choose. Staking out the hardest-line position of all, he declared that the public has absolutely no right to attend any...