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Fall 2007 Bulletin
Court Access: Connecticut Newspaper Publishes Details About Jurors; Defends its Decision
The (Bridgeport) Connecticut Post has defended itself against criticism for publishing personal information about 18 jurors and alternates in a story about a high profile murder case in the region. The information appeared in a Sept. 9, 2007 front page graphic that showed 18 empty chairs with the name, occupation, and hometown of the jurors written on them.
The trial court empaneled the jurors to sentence Russell Peeler Jr., who was convicted of ordering his brother to kill Karen Clarke and her 8-year-old son Leroy Brown to cover up the murder of Clarke’s boyfriend. The Post covered the story extensively. More than 40 stories and several letters to the editor appear in online archives dating from September 9 to the jury’s October 15 recommendation that Peeler receive the death penalty.
After the September 9 story, Judge Robert J. Devlin Jr. dismissed one juror and one alternate who expressed safety concerns due to the publicity, The New York Times reported September 17. Several Post readers wrote letters to the editor critical of the decision to publish the graphic. The letters argued that publishing personal information about jurors would endanger their safety, expose them to intimidation from groups on both sides of the death penalty debate, and make people reluctant to serve on juries.
James H. Smith, editor at the Post, defended the decision to publish the jurors’ names in a September 10 story in the Post. “We set out to write an article about how a jury is picked for a death penalty case. It’s about life and death. It’s an important issue and the article went a long way to showing our readers how those jurors are selected. American juries have always been public. It is only exceptional cases when they are not,” he said.
But Erskine McIntosh, a lawyer for Peeler, criticized the Post’s decision to publish the jurors’ names in his closing arguments before the jurors, the Post reported October 10. “Something has been taken from you, it was taken by the Connecticut Post. Your right to have your verdict [be] the product of your cool, calculated deliberation of the evidence without corrosion. Editor James Smith, who lives with his family in Oxford, is no editor, he is a spell checker – a journalist would have known better,” he told the jurors.
Two journalism professors interviewed by The New York Times suggested that editors should be more careful about publishing sensitive information in cases like this one.
Christopher Hanson, a journalism ethics professor at the University of Maryland, told The Times that newspapers should balance the public’s right to know against the risk of harm to the jurors. Robert M. Steele of the Poynter Institute, and a member of the Silha Center advisory board, suggested an alternative: publish the substantive information about the jurors, but withhold their names.
- Michael Schoepf, Silha Research Assistant
University of Minnesota | College of Liberal Arts | School of Journalism and Mass Communication
