AUGUSTA – It was a relatively routine court hearing.
A 17-year-old girl was sentenced to 10 days in jail on a May day for trashing a woman’s home. Kennebec Journal reporter Elbert Aull sat in the gallery, taking notes for a story he’d write later that day.
Then District Judge Michael Westcott did something unusual. He told Aull and another reporter not to print the name of a girl mentioned several times during the hearing. Aull was shocked by the decision, describing the order later as something you’d read about in a journalism class but not expect to see in the real world.
“It’s not often that a judge walks on your First Amendment rights,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do. I could not believe someone would do that.”
The Kennebec Journal protested and launched an appeal.
“The order is clearly unconstitutional,” wrote David B. Offer, the paper’s executive editor, in an editorial published a day later. “Since colonial days it has been recognized that no one – not a president, not a general, certainly not a judge in Maine – has the power to tell a newspaper what not to print.”
Still, the Kennebec Journal decided to obey Westcott’s order. It didn’t print the girl’s name. The paper decided to respect the court’s authority, Offer wrote, even as it protested the decision.
The appeal never had its day in court. Westcott voided his order shortly after. And he called the newspaper to apologize for his mistake.
“I give the judge a great deal of credit for that,” Offer said in advance of Sunshine Week. “He re-examined the issue and opted in favor of openness.”
The newspaper found itself in a similar predicament last November when lawyers challenged a reporter’s presence at a Kennebec County Probate Court hearing on guardianship for the two children of a man accused of murdering their mother.
Judge James Mitchell offered the newspaper a chance to present its arguments by telephone. After several phone calls, he ruled there was no statute allowing the hearing to be closed to the press.
Offer believes the disputes offer a lasting lesson: “The issue shows that these are rights that are a bit fragile,” he said. “You have to assert them, otherwise they can gradually erode.”
The court disputes were the most significant freedom-of-access issues faced by the Kennebec Journal in 2004, but there were others.
For example, the Windsor Board of Selectmen, as officials in small towns sometimes do, went behind closed doors to discuss whether the town should wait to hire a new road supervisor. A Kennebec Journal editorial protested that decision, too, saying the public had a right to see and hear the meeting.
“We don’t demand openness because it’s something wonderful for the newspaper,” Offer said. “We insist on openness because we’re a surrogate for the public.”
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