Supreme Court, start your engines

Print the goddamn story.
Period.

 

I might be missing something, but this is the part that I don't get:

The Star waited to report those details until the release of the redacted warrant and had the story ready to print before Riley issued his order late Wednesday. In support of his order, the judge cited his previous decision that limited the release of details in the warrant and Sharp's rights.

The way this sounds, this is just what they get for waiting to release those details until a less-complete version was put out. I don't understand why they waited if warrants and such are presumed to be public.

If the Star got ahold of it, it should've printed it, ASAP. The fact that they didn't was the precedent that was set. The judge thought that if he could limit the info in the first place, he could certainly do so later.

It's a shame, too, that an earlier version of the story had the judge's first name wrong. It doesn't make any difference as far as the principle of the case is concerned, of course, but it doesn't help in terms of credibility in an important, and now, possibly, a landmark, instance.

 

The case would have to wend its way through the state courts before it got to SCOTUS anyway ... if SCOTUS ever decided to take it up. That's four stages of appeals away.

I agree with Fenian. Print it and let the chips fall where they may.

 

And people wonder why newspapers are dying. We let a judge determine what we can print. Shame on the publisher.

 

YOU ONLY COVER US WHEN THE JUDGE SAYS YOU CAN'T PRINT IT!

 

Yeah, shame on the publisher, but I don't really think this isolated case is what's ailing newspapers.

 

Loving the completely hypothetical outrage at the Supreme Court on this one...

 

This is why I don't go on the Politics board any more.

Show me one case where anybody on the current court has suggested, during their tenure on the bench*, that prior restraint under these circumstances.

Don't give me Scalia's "troop ship" example, because if you do, well lookee here what the Washington post said in 1987:

(T)he Court has suggested it might issue a prior restraint if necessary to avert grave and imminent harm to the national security. And the two Federal appellate judges who took part in the Tulane discussion agreed with Justice Scalia's view ... Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth Circuit.

In the 1998 Avis case, where a California court tried to issue an injuction against offensive speech by an individual, Clarence Thomas "argued with some force that such an injunction against oral utterance clashed with the Court’s prior-restraint jurisprudence no less clearly than would a gag against a publisher or broadcaster." (www.firstamendmentcenter.org)

These are the kinds of things that make you say, Hmmmm.


P.S. Who hears the cases after Jan. 21? Highest bidders?


*-I may have left you an opening. Can you find it?

 

Print it, baby. Let God sort 'em out.

 

Well, Clarence spoke up proudly for the right of a supervisor to call his Latino employees "fucking spics" and the like on the job.
Color me shocked.

 

Leave Frogman alone.

He got his.

You gotta problem with that?

 

Judges are like dictators. They have way too much power.