Word: pretrial
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...trail of up to 36 young women victims, spanning four years and four states. As a final outlandish touch, his sensational murder trial is being televised live, under a recent Florida high court decision. It was not affected by last week's Supreme Court ruling that pretrial hearings need not be public...
...Pretrial hearings may be held in secret, the court rules...
...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 criminal cases are disposed of before they ever reach trial. It is during pretrial hearings that abuses by police and prosecutors are most likely to come out. Powell, arguing that the public ought to know what goes on in the courts, wanted explicitly to grant reporters a First Amendment "interest...
...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...
...despite claims by the Government of national security; unanimously (7-0) struck down a Virginia statute last year that penalized newspapers for revealing secret disciplinary proceedings against a judge; and forbade courts in 1976 to "gag" the press to keep it from printing information it had obtained at open pretrial hearings...