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Monday, August 31, 2009
Courts - "You don’t see newspapers fighting to open court proceedings the way they used to, and people are starting to notice"
That is the lede to this column today by Adam Liptak of the NY Times. Some quotes from this important article:
“The days of powerful newspapers with ample legal budgets appear to be numbered,” wrote a public defender in Georgia, Gerard Kleinrock, in a recent Supreme Court brief. “Will underfunded bloggers be able to carry the financial burdens of opening our courtrooms?”The brief concerned the case of Eric Presley, a Georgia man convicted of cocaine trafficking. The judge closed the courtroom during jury selection in Mr. Presley’s case, on the theory that it was too small to accommodate both potential jurors and the public. Citing the public’s lack of access to the jury selection, Mr. Presley appealed, and the Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear his case.* * *
Companies that still have ample resources do not always share a journalistic commitment to open government.
Consider the aftermath of a recent settlement in a lawsuit against Amtrak. After the railroad lost a $24 million jury verdict and while its appeal was pending, it agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to the plaintiffs, two trespassing teenagers who suffered severe electric burns after they climbed onto a parked train.
As part of the settlement, the parties asked Judge Lawrence F. Stengel of Federal District Court in Philadelphia not only to vacate eight of his decisions in the case but also to “direct LexisNexis and Westlaw to remove the decisions” from “their respective legal research services/databases.”
The judge agreed, and the database companies complied.
“In the infrequent event that we are ordered by the court to remove a decision from Westlaw,” explained John Shaughnessy, a spokesman for the service, which is owned by ThomsonReuters, “we will comply with the order, deleting the text of the decision but keeping the title of the case and its docket number. We also publish the court’s order to remove so there’s a clear record of the action.”
A LexisNexis spokeswoman said more or less the same thing.
Kathleen A. Bergin, who teaches at South Texas College of Law, said she found the companies’ actions perplexing. “These are public acts issued by public officials,” she said of the decisions, “and the public has an interest in them.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 31, 2009 01:37 PM
Posted to Courts in general