Supreme Court Splits 5-4 In Banning The Televising Of Prop. 8 Trial
And, the Supreme Court (or at least the right-wing of it) strikes a blow for non-transparency in governmental proceedings…This decision may have far-reaching and chilling effects on the televising of important judicial disputes of our lifetime.
Amplify’d from cyberesq.wordpress.com
After an initial ban of two days (vote = 8-1 [J. Breyer, dissenting], the U.S. Supreme Court voted Wednesday to permanently ban any public broadcast of the Prop. 8, same-sex marriage trial. In an unsigned, 17-page ruling – in which the Court spends considerable time chiding both District Court Judge Vaughn Walker and the 9th Circuit for issuing their orders to televise the Prop. 8 trial – the Supreme Court banned any televised broadcast of the trial “around the country.”
The vote was 5-4 along ideological lines, as follows:
Majority: Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas
Dissent: Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Stevens
The order televising the Prop. 8 trial was to be part of a pilot program instituted by the 9th Circuit. The goal of this program is, or perhaps was, to increase public awareness of the federal court system and federal proceedings by bringing video cameras into the courtroom.
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