Juries Can Be Trusted

The cases of two 17-year-old Tarzana youths who were arrested in May on bank-robbery charges have been extensively covered in local newspapers, including the San Fernando Valley edition of The Times. As a result, Judge Burton S. Katz of the Sylmar Juvenile Court feared that the publicity would hamper the youths’ ability to get a fair trial. So he barred the press and the public from pretrial proceedings and slapped a gag order on participants in the case, forbidding them to discuss it in public. He further ordered the press not to try to contact persons attending the hearings. On reflection, though, he realized that the second order was both unconstitutional and unenforceable, and he set it aside. He should have set aside the other orders, which are on appeal.

The notion that pretrial publicity adversely affects the eventual outcome of a criminal trial is demonstrably not true. Juries show time and again that they take their responsibilities very seriously and that they render verdicts based on the facts brought out in court. Last year’s trial of John DeLorean, which was the subject of massive publicity before and during the trial, is a case in point. The jury found him not guilty, and no one claimed that the trial had been unfair.

Gag orders are offensive not because the press seeks special privileges but because all judicial proceedings should be conducted in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review. The Court of Appeal should let the lawyers speak and let the public attend the hearings.