Judge J.P. Mauffray is disappointed. He had desperately wanted to use the juvenile justice privacy provisions to deflect public attention from the Mychal Bell trial and all court proceedings related thereto. As Howard Witt explains below, Rapides Parish
District Judge, Thomas Yeager, isn’t standing for it. “The right to an open trial is one that’s very important,” Yeager said in making his ruling, “so that the public has confidence in what we do.”
Now we must wait to see if Mychal Bell’s juvenile trial, currently scheduled for December 6th, will be continued to a later date so Mauffray can appeal Yeager’s decision. For Mychal’s sake, I hope it is.
On a related note, Robert Bailey’s trial, originally scheduled for next week, has been indefinitely postponed. For the sake of the defendants, Jena residents, and prosecutor Reed Walters, these cases are best settled out of court.
_____________________________________
By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
1:24 PM CST, November 21, 2007
JENA, La.
A judge ruled Wednesday that the public and the news media should have full access to all legal proceedings involving Mychal Bell, one of the teenage defendants in the racially-charged Jena 6 case in Louisiana, whose prosecution had been shrouded in secrecy on orders of the trial judge.
Ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Chicago Tribune and joined by a coalition of major U.S. media companies, Rapides Parish District Judge Thomas Yeager ordered that Bell’s upcoming criminal trial, as well as any pre-trial hearings, must be open to the press and the public.
Yeager also ordered that the court record and transcripts of any closed proceedings held so far be made available to the news media, and that attorneys for Bell be released from the trial judge’s gag order directing them not to speak about the case.
“The right to an open trial is one that’s very important,” Yeager said in making his ruling, “so that the public has confidence in what we do.”
Yeager’s ruling was a rebuke to LaSalle Parish District Judge J.P. Mauffray, who had ordered that all the proceedings in Bell’s case should be closed because the youth, who is now 17, is being tried as a juvenile for his alleged part in the beating of a white student at Jena High School last December.
The news media argued, and Yeager agreed, that Louisiana law, while generally mandating that juvenile matters must be kept confidential, nevertheless requires that certain juvenile cases involving serious felony charges must be open to the public. Bell is charged with aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy, two of the charges that qualify to be heard in open court under state law, Yeager ruled.
It was the second major setback for Mauffray in the Bell case. Last June, Mauffray presided when Bell was tried and convicted as an adult on the battery and conspiracy charges. An appellate court later vacated that conviction, ruling that Jena District Attorney Reed Walters and Mauffray had improperly tried Bell as an adult rather than a juvenile.
Mauffray sat as a spectator in his own courtroom Wednesday as Yeager, appointed by the state supreme court as a visiting judge to hear the news media case, politely upbraided him.
“It’s not discretionary, it’s mandatory,” Yeager said. “[Mauffray] should open the proceedings and he should open the court records. It’s not a confidential case.”
Mauffray declined to comment after the ruling. But his attorneys vowed to immediately appeal the decision and asked Yeager to suspend its enforcement until that appeal is heard.
Yeager said he would only suspend his ruling if all parties in Bell’s case, currently scheduled for trial Dec. 6, will agree to postpone the trial and any other pretrial proceedings while Mauffray’s appeal makes it way through a higher court. Otherwise, Yeager said, the news media and the public would suffer irreparable harm if their access to past and future court proceedings is denied while the appeal is pending.
In a court filing last week in answer to the media coalition lawsuit, Mauffray’s attorneys had already conceded that Bell’s upcoming trial is required to be open under state law. But Mauffray had argued that the news media had no right to access pretrial proceedings or court records.
“This was a great victory for the press today and the rights of the people to observe the workings of the court,” said Mary Ellen Roy, lead attorney for the news media coalition.
Bell and five other black teenagers face trial for the Dec. 4 beating of a white student, Justin Barker, who was attacked and briefly knocked unconscious. That incident capped months of violent racial tensions in Jena set off after a black student asked school administrators for permission to sit beneath a shade tree in the high school courtyard traditionally used only by whites. The next day, three white students hung nooses from the tree-an offense dismissed as a youthful prank by school officials but denounced by many black students and their parents as a hate crime.
Walters had initially charged the Jena 6 defendants with attempted murder, but later reduced the charges. Civil rights leaders have criticized the prosecution of the black youths as excessive and indicative of what they assert is a pattern of unequal justice in the mostly white town of 2,867.
Friends of Justice 