Word: press
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 open democracy. It is also by far the court's sharpest blow to the press in a long string of such adverse rulings. At its narrowest, the decision means that pre-trial hearings could be closed when the judge finds a defendant's rights may be prejudiced. At its worst, it means that during any criminal proceeding, whenever the defendant, prosecutor and judge see fit, the courtroom doors...
Many in the press and the legal profession fear the worst. "I hate this decision," said Columbia University's journalism professor emeritus Fred Friendly. New York Press Lawyer Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. called it "outrageous." Fumed Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, an expert on the Constitution: "There will be no need to gag the press if the stories can be choked off at the source." Said Allen Neuharth, chairman of the Gannett newspaper chain that brought the suit: "This decision is a signal that those judges who share the philosophy of secret trials can now run Star Chamber justice...
...with murdering an ex-policeman named Wayne Clapp had come to court trying to block the prosecution from using confessions and a murder weapon, which they claimed had been illegally obtained by police. At the hearing, the defense lawyers asked Judge Daniel DePasquale to bar the public and the press from court. The lawyers argued that adverse publicity would jeopardize their clients' chance for a fair trial. The prosecutor made no objection, and the judge cleared the courtroom. But a reporter from Gannett's Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and Times-Union later challenged the judge's ruling...
...another day the question whether judges must weigh that interest against the defendant's right to a fair trial. The Sixth Amendment's public-trial guarantee belongs only to the criminally accused, wrote Stewart, not to the public itself. He specifically refused to concede that the press or the public possesses a constitutional right, under the First Amendment, to attend criminal trials. Even if such a right of "access" did exist, Stewart went on, it would have to yield to a defendant's guarantee of a fair trial...
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 criminal proceedings. A trial court, Rehnquist added, "is not required by the Sixth Amendment to advance any reason whatsoever for declining to open a pretrial hearing to the public." He specifically rejected the notion that the First Amendment is "some kind of constitutional 'sunshine...