Word: pretrial
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...what happened at My Lai, Calley was the only man convicted of any crime in the massacre. His attorneys appealed that verdict in the civil courts, and last September a federal judge overruled the Army and threw out Calley's conviction, partly on the grounds that pretrial publicity had prejudiced his case. That set the stage for last week's double denouement: the civil courts released Calley pending the Army's appeal to uphold the conviction, and Army Secretary Howard H. Callaway paroled Calley, since he had served with good behavior a third of his sentence...
...jury. Not to be overlooked, however, is the second Sheppard trial held in that same "poisoned" city, Cleveland, where a determined trial judge produced an obviously fair proceeding. Although I agree with Judge Elliot's reversal of the Calley conviction on other grounds, I cannot believe that pretrial publicity was a factor in the original verdict...
...other event that reopened the fair-trial, free-press issue came last month, when Federal District Court Judge J. Robert Elliott reversed the conviction of William Galley and ordered him released from confinement in the My Lai case. Elliott's foremost argument was that "massive adverse pretrial publicity" had prevented the six-officer panel at Galley's court-martial in 1971 from considering the case without prejudice and that, therefore, he had not been fairly tried...
...that a case is endlessly discussed and publicized before anyone is brought to trial mean that no jurors can possibly be found to decide guilt or innocence? The Constitution guarantees that a defendant will be tried on the evidence presented in court. The vast majority of cases never attract pretrial attention in print or on the air waves. Yet in an age of burgeoning communications, some of the most morally crucial cases-as well as many that are merely sensational-are so widely publicized before trial that scarcely any citizen sound of sight and hearing will have failed to learn...
That is not to say that pretrial publicity is never a hazard to justice. The longstanding argument over the rights of free press v. the rights to fair trial goes back, in its modern phase, to cases like the Lindbergh kidnaping: the courtroom at Bruno Hauptmann's trial turned into a grotesque circus, jammed with 150 reporters and cameramen. In the case of Cleveland Osteopath Sam Sheppard, accused of murdering his wife in 1954, the local newspapers ran a virtual crusade for conviction before and during the trial. Incredibly, the jurors at first were allowed to go home...