Alabama Judge Sets Gag Order in Fatal Church Bombing Trial

Upset with news reports about secret FBI recordings, a judge imposed a gag order Thursday on attorneys in the trial of a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls.

“I felt like we need to try this case in the courtroom and not in the news media,” Circuit Judge James Garrett said.

The order came after defense lawyer John Robbins said news reports about secret recordings of his client, Thomas Blanton Jr., had tainted the jury pool and warranted a mistrial.

After the questioning recessed until today, Garrett said Robbins had asked for the mistrial and that he would review the request. But he said he felt an impartial jury could be picked and there likely would be no need to move the trial out of Birmingham.

Blanton, 62, is charged with murder in the dynamite bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963. The blast killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson.

The church had become a gathering place for civil rights activists.

Garrett on Monday had ordered prospective jurors to avoid news reports about the case.

Before the gag order was imposed, Robbins said he would ask for a mistrial partly because of a story Tuesday by Associated Press and an ABC News report Wednesday on tapes of Blanton secretly recorded in the 1960s by FBI informant Mitchell Burns.

Burns, a former Ku Klux Klansman, recorded Blanton on a tape recorder that the FBI had hidden in the trunk of Burns’ car.

Burns told the AP that Blanton once said: “They ain’t gonna catch me when I bomb my next church.” He also said he was uncertain if there was enough evidence for a conviction.

“He never admitted he did it. It’s all circumstantial,” Burns told AP.

A lawyer for Blanton asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to exclude other secret FBI recordings from the trial. The devices installed in Blanton’s kitchen in 1964 lacked clear government approval in violation of a 1967 Supreme Court ruling against unauthorized surveillance, the motion said.

The request has been rejected by Alabama appeals courts.