Rule 904

After a ten-day police hunt last July, a handy man in Baltimore confessed the murder of two eleven-year-old girls. Anywhere else in the U.S., it would have been Page One news. But not in Baltimore. There, judges of the Supreme Bench have a rule forbidding stories on confessions in local cases, because they think it might prejudice the defendant's right to an impartial trial. In the nine years in which Rule 904 has been in force the press has never seriously challenged it. When in doubt, an editor usually calls up a judge to ask what to print. So last July the city's dailies kept obediently mum on the confession, though Washington (D.C.) papers, which circulate in Baltimore, carried it. Local radio stations broadcast the story--and were cited for contempt of court for violating the judges' rule.

Last week in a criminal court, the radio stations fought the newspapers' battle and their own, and lost. Judge John B. Gray Jr. tried to resolve the conflict between the right of the free press and the right of an accused man to a fair and impartial trial. The defense argued that the courts in Baltimore, as elsewhere in the U.S., had their own ways of insuring against prejudiced trials.

Judge Gray was unmoved. He ruled that in such cases the freedom of the press had to be abridged and could legally be abridged; the broadcasts, he said, had "an effect that members of a jury panel would be bound to carry into a jury room." The stations and a commentator were convicted and fined from $100 to $500. Rule 904 would stand, at least until the stations could appeal to a higher court.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.