Ito’s Wasting His Power on a Willful Press : He can’t control everything being printed or broadcast. So let’s get on with the trial.

For more than a month, Judge Lance A. Ito, presiding in the O.J. Simpson case, has taken the public’s fundamental First Amendment right of court access on a wild roller-coaster ride.

The ride began, jarringly, with the judge’s threats in August that led to the secret filing of many legal papers in the Simpson case. Still traveling, the roller coaster last week negotiated the judge’s frustrated reactions to publication of a tawdry book based on Faye Resnick’s alleged reminiscences about murder victim Nicole Brown Simpson.

Any effect of the Resnick book on the Simpson trial was largely created by Ito’s public tirades about it. But in pursuing his protests, and in his related decision to bar reporters from jury selection, Ito spent valuable court time informally attempting to persuade the media not to do what he candidly acknowledges they have every right to do.

Experience teaches that a free press either will or will not behave responsibly. But it is the public, not Ito, that has the capacity to reward or punish media irresponsibility.

The sooner he realizes he cannot cajole, shame or scare the press into greater responsibility, the sooner Ito will be able to return to the only truly important business at hand--the trial of a double murder.

Resnick’s yarn is not the first--and certainly not the most sensational--story ever told about Nicole or O.J. Simpson. Had Ito simply ignored this book, it quickly would have faded from the public consciousness. Ito’s actions have had the unfortunate, but entirely predictable, effect of elevating the public’s and media’s interest in this tawdry, 244-page “reminiscence.” Ito played perfectly into the publisher’s marketing strategy.

Ito’s fury about the book also spurred the ever-resourceful Simpson defense team to prepare a prejudicial publicity motion that hyperbolically characterizes this book as the legal equivalent of “a drive-by shooting.”

In each of three letters Ito wrote to try to persuade television outlets not to air interviews with Resnick, the judge contended that any interview would serve “only to fan the flames of adverse publicity and further jeopardize the parties’ right to a fair trial.”

But what did he mean by “further jeopardize?” Is the judge now implying that Simpson’s Sixth Amendment fair trial rights have already been jeopardized by prior publicity? If so, this is clearly inconsistent with his earlier view that none of the publicity to date--including the infamous “bloody sock” story--had prejudiced Simpson’s right to a fair trial.

One possible response, of course, is that we are now in the midst of the particularly delicate process of jury selection. Yet any problems that this fact might have posed were remedied by the enhanced admonition delivered to the pool of jurors last week.

Going the extra step of singling out the Resnick book has only drawn more attention to its salacious allegations. At the same time, however, we now confront the very real specter that Ito’s own words may provide inventive defense counsel with grounds for an appellate reversal premised upon “prejudicial publicity”--presuming, of course, that Simpson is ever tried and convicted.

For the past two months, Ito has acted as if he can somehow control the press. He has threatened to “gag” all trial participants and to impose a blanket order sealing all court-filed documents. Until the defense objected, he briefly conducted jury selection in secret.

He has threatened to withdraw the press pass of a local reporter whose newspaper published excerpts from the blank juror questionnaire one day before he formally released it. He has threatened to bar other reporters from the Criminal Courts Building and to cut off all electronic courtroom coverage in retaliation for the “bloody sock” story--a report which had absolutely nothing to do with any in-court proceedings.

And now he is spending court resources imploring the national media to voluntarily muzzle itself. The sooner Ito realizes that such attempts to control the press are neither possible nor desirable in our constitutional democracy, the sooner he and the parties can return to the important tasks of picking a jury, disposing of ever-proliferating pretrial motions, and, at long last, finally deciding the guilt or innocence of O.J. Simpson.