Court orders gag of information about a plea bargain

Posted by Terry Francke, General Counsel | Jul 17, 2018 | Awareness Area: Justice, Legal Issue: Freedom of the Press, News | 0 |

When a court clerk mistakenly files as a public document information that was meant to be filed under seal, may the judge correct the error by demanding that the media who have published the information online now delete it?

That is the issue before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit arising from just such a censorship order imposed on the Los Angeles Times by a U.S. District Court judge on Saturday.

In a draft friend of the court brief signed by more than a dozen press advocates—including CalAware—the Ninth Circuit is being asked to rule that under the First Amendment, the horse is out of the barn.

The Times story is here; the draft brief is here.

About The Editor

Terry Francke, General Counsel

Terry Francke has a 39-year history of helping journalists, citizens and public officials understand and use their First Amendment and open government rights. With CalAware, Francke has authored comprehensive and authoritative guidebooks to California law on access to government meetings and public records and the news gathering and publication rights of journalists. Focusing on these issues in public forum law, he supervises CalAware's legislative and litigation initiatives; conducts workshops on legal compliance; helps design public records audits; supports local sunshine ordinance drafting efforts; writes CalAware Today, a blog on current developments and proposals in the law and best practices; and answers countless queries by phone and e-mail from citizens, journalists, public officials and employees, and lawyers. Francke previously served 14 years as executive director and general counsel to the California First Amendment Coalition, after a 10-year post as legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He has served as an advisory panel member to the National Center on Courts and the Media; taught journalism law at the Department of Communication at Stanford University; and served as an expert contributor to the 1994 major revisions to the Ralph M. Brown Act and the 2004 ballot proposition making open government a basic right of citizens under the California Constitution. Francke is a 1967 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a 1979 graduate of McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific. Prior to his legal career, Francke worked as a weekly newspaper editor and in military and local government public affairs positions.

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