Word: public
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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'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...
...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" in attending criminal proceedings. But, he added, that interest should be balanced against the risk of unfair publicity. In this case, said Powell, Judge DePasquale had struck the right balance by excluding...
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...
...dissenters was the likelihood that some lower-court judges will take Rehnquist at his word and begin closing off courtrooms for no good reason. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for himself and Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Byron White, accused the court of overreacting to the risks of prejudicial publicity in the Clapp murder case. News articles about the case were "placid, routine and innocuous," wrote Blackmun. "There was no screaming headline, no lurid photograph, no front-page overemphasis." Nonetheless, the court "reached for a strict and flat result," he said, an "inflexible rule" that ignores or pays little heed...
Houchins vs. KQED (1978), Pell vs. Procunier (1974) and Saxbe vs. Washington Post (1974). The press has no more right of access to public institutions than does the general public...