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Keeping records, meetings and decisions “public” is a never-ending job for the press. It is a large undertaking in every session of the Indiana Legislature to ward off the bills and amendments which would curtail the public’s “right to know.”
Of course, there are attempts at the local and federal levels too, not just the state.
Most often (but not always) these attempts are by well-meaning people, sometimes for an emotional reason but more frequently because they perceive governmental business to be the business of the governing, not of the people -- the folks who are needed to supply the money in taxes but not considered as competent or high-minded as those in governing circles.
Nevertheless, it should be conceded also that this unceasing thrust, fed by the limitless resources and time of school, governmental and social activists who know better than the public what’s good for the public, also produces a knee-jerk position in the media, whether news-editorial associates will grant it or not.
It really IS possible that two of the three county commissioners happened to come into the same restaurant and actually are seeking coffee and a sandwich, not trying to settle county issues outside open meetings.
Of course, we do remember in years past the firing of a county road chief in a pickup truck and the pre-announced firing of another one, with that made official at the next meeting -- all in violation of law.
But on the knee-jerk score, this editor can see where courts are coming from in regard to shielding jurors, even though that shield shouldn’t be for the cause of wimp protection. A society that sends its youth in harm’s way around the world should not have qualms about calling on the citizenry to gut up and decide a jury case. Freedom isn’t free, we were reminded again on Memorial Day.
However, judges DO have a responsibility and a legitimate concern over jurors keeping their eyes on the ball.
A juror is not a legislator, not a council member or Congress member, chosen to make open public decisions and open public discussions and stand responsible for them.
A juror is designated to meet in secret with fellow jurors.
Regardless of those increasingly complicated and complex sets of instructions that courts have to give jurors, the primary duty of the juror is very simple to define, even if not always easy to do.
It is, in matters of contention, to decide who is telling the truth. It is only in the most recent generation that the press has become obsessed with the question of why jurors did what they did. Unless there was cause to believe or suspect that there had been great abuses in the jury room or outside corruption of some sort, the assumption on a jury outcome was “that’s how the jurors or at least some of them saw and heard the case.”
A person who doesn’t believe jurors are capable of making decisions DOES have the alternative of having the case decided by the judge.
But since the reporters’ “standard operating procedure” now has become interrogating jurors, the courts DO have cause for some concern. In past years names of jurors were much more accessible and they rarely were asked afterwards about why. In this writer’s long experience, there were some occasions when a juror would volunteer an explanation or comment without being asked, and that was fine.
If jurors were like council members or commissioners or legislators, etc., they should expect that function of their duties would be to address concerns and explain their actions and do it well in a responsibility to those they represent. But a juror is plucked out of the population to serve a need. Is it to be a juror’s job description that he or she be a public relations specialist?
The courts in some cases may be seeking to protect the physical safety of jurors amid societal conditions that have become much more fragile in recent years. And they may be seeking to protect the principles surrounding jurors and the focus on that chief duty, deciding what and who is more truthful.
A generation ago, the courts went on a kick really often contrary to the 6th Amendment “fair trial” rights by allowing changes of venue if anyone had ever read a newspaper or listened to a broadcast. This writer can remember a murder case decided by the 12 dumbest people in Wells County -- they never read or heard anything and were chosen on that basis.
The English Common Law from which much of our law came was founded in villages where everyone knew everyone else and when a big crime’s perpetrator already was known to all possible jurors. Yet the principle was upheld that jurors swore to decide the case solely on what was presented in court and nothing else.
Keeping alive that spirit and trust in the court procedure is a function of the courts so that integrity and diligence and best thinking of jurors are in the job descriptions, not public relations.
We in the press need to understand and seek to work with the courts in this effort, not knee-jerk assume they are up to evil behind those black robes.
JIM BARBIERI
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