Leaks Multiply in Jackson Case
Even though Judge Rodney Melville has tried to seal them off, leaks continue to spurt from many sides in the upcoming Michael Jackson trial. No one has been identified as the source of the leaks, but ABC’s “Primetime Live” broadcast a report on the testimony on January 13, 2005. Judge Melville has now allowed Jackson to respond to the broadcast. Jackson taped an interview with journalist Geraldo Rivera which has not yet been released. (Robert Jablon, Leaks Thwart Secrecy in Jackson Case, Miami Herald, herald.com, January 29, 2005). The judge also approved a Jackson statement, which appears on his website.
The Jackson trial has now begun. Reporters of every sort, from CNN to Entertainment Tonight, are covering the trial. But many wonder whether the public will be as interested as it was in the Simpson proceeding, since it will not see the kind of gavel to gavel coverage that was such a feature of that event.
Such attempts to control information about a high-profile case to which both the public and the news media demand access necessarily raise questions about the extent to which such control is possible, particularly in our highly technological age. Understandably the judges in charge of cases such as these want to preserve the rights of the defendants as well as the rights of the public in obtaining information about the process as well as in seeing justice done. But too little information simply makes us suspicious about what we don’t know, or hungry for more. During the Kobe Bryant trial we saw at least one instance of a presumably accidental leak which nevertheless let the legal feline out of the bag and may have ultimately derailed the prosecution, after a contentious summer among the Eagle County, Colorado D.A.’s office, Judge Terry Ruckriegle, and the national media that culminated in Associated Press v. District Court for the 5th Judicial District Court of Colorado (125 S. Ct. 1 (2004)). The transcripts in the Phil Spector case have been released despite Spector’s lawyers’ objections. Spector was famous in the sixties; apparently he is no longer celebrated, or at least he is much less celebrated than Michael Jackson. The judge in that case, having weighed the interests at stake, found that Spector’s arguments that his right to a fair trial would be further prejudiced by a release of the grand jury transcript before the start of the actual proceedings were not persuasive. What further tipped the balance is that fact that in California the law requires that the transcripts be released within 10 days after the defendant receives a full transcript. Sometimes the defendant asks that the transcript be sealed pursuant to California Penal Code section 938.1(b). “The transcript shall not be open to the public until 10 days after its delivery to the defendant or the defendant’s attorney. Thereafter the transcript shall be open to the public unless the court orders otherwise on its own motion or on motion of a party pending a determination as to whether all or part of the transcript should be sealed. If the court determines that there is a reasonable likelihood that making all or any part of the transcript public may prejudice a defendant’s right to a fair and impartial trial, that part of the transcript shall be sealed until the defendant’s trial has been completed.”
For those interested in portrayals of media law in film, check out movies like The Front Page, first filmed in 1931, and based on the Ben Hecht play. It was remade in 1945 and in 1974, and as His Girl Friday in 1940 with Rosalind Russell in the role of the journalist who simply can’t walk away from the big story and as Switching Channels with Kathleen Turner in the Rosalind Russell role. It’s also been adapted for television.