SO, EXACTLY WHAT PART OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT DID JUDGE HILLERI MERRITT NOT UNDERSTAND?
Friday’s LA Times editorial explains it all:
A unanimous panel of California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal has at last cleaned up a shameful legal mess, ordering L.A. County Superior Court Judge Hilleri G. Merritt to end her prior restraint on the Los Angeles Times.
Earlier this month, after first granting The Times the right to photograph a criminal defendant appearing in her courtroom, Merritt changed her mind and ordered the paper not to publish the lawfully taken picture. The Times, showing more respect for the law than Merritt did, obeyed her order while it appealed, first to her to reconsider and later, when she refused, to the higher court. On Thursday, that court inevitably concluded, as it was required to, that she had violated the 1st Amendment.
Writing for himself and two colleagues, Judge Sanjay T. Kumar produced a stark reminder of just how far Merritt had strayed from well-established law in waging her campaign against open courts and a free press. Riffling through citations, the court noted that “an order enjoining publication of a photograph of a suspect in a pending court proceeding is classic prior restraint of speech.” Publishing “lawfully obtained, truthful information about a matter of public significance cannot be restrained unless it is necessary to protect a state interest of the highest order.” And the “barriers to prior restraint remain high and the presumption against its use continues intact.” Not once, as Kumar made clear, has any appellate court concluded that those barriers could be overcome in a case such as this…
Read the rest.
And here’s the news story by Andrew Blankstein on the same topic.
And here is a previous LAT editorial on the matter.
AND here’s what Wired Magazine had to say earlier this month.
By the way, it is not entirely comforting that a criminal court judge hearing high profile cases has such a high-handed and faulty an understanding of the legal principal prohibiting prior restraint.
FYI: The photo above is from an LAPD handout of murder defendant Alberd Tersargyan—whose in-court photo—taken originally with the permission of the judge—was the one in question.