Robert Sheridan
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:57:11 -0800
http://tinyurl.com/yh48u4hDon't recall the case(s), but isn't there said to be a concomitant right in the public to receive information as well as to express it? Perhaps the right to hear and consider is not as powerful as the right to consider and express. Pity.
The above news article reports, re the gag order on the Prop. 8 trial on gay marriage in USDC in San Francisco, that a group has re-enacted the trial using actors in place of witnesses, and has put it out on YouTube, defeating the Court's order, to some extent, on one of the more interesting Conlaw cases to come to trial recently. It might've served as a model of how Conlaw can be made or influenced, much as the O.J. trial was a seminar in California criminal procedure. I should've thought that the Court might've wanted to allow the real thing to be presented rather than some re-creation where in some other case artistic license was employed to distort the presentation and the public got fed.
The speculation I entertain is that the Supreme Court issued the ban on the trial on the theory that to have allowed the hearing to be broadcast live at the trial level would undermine the judgment, or preference, of some of the justices that their own proceedings not be televised, although sometimes they've been re-broadcast aurally, I think live, as in Bush v. Gore (2000).
The reason given is usually said to be that cameras in the court might intimidate witnesses or encourage participants to play to the camera. Witness concerns can likely be accommodated, as are jury privacy issues, using orders not to train the camera on the subject's face for example. As for attorneys and judges playing to the camera, I should think that could be taken care of as well. Not Judge Ito's fault that the late nite TV comics did skits satirizing him, at least I don't think it was his fault; maybe he did something to deserve it, I don't know.
Aren't we sufficiently experienced with the various popular media to take more-or-less for granted being photographed w/o going into hysterics?
It wouldn't surprise me to learn some day in the future that the public trial guarantee in criminal cases includes the right to have it broadcast as a limiting influence on the legitimacy of the process. Had Salem been broadcast in 1692 there might have been fewer hangings. What other cases might have well been broadcast for educational value?
The arguments in Brown v. Board (1954)? rs _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Conlawprof@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/conlawprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.