Off to a shaky start
As discussed here and here, I'll be one of several (probably one of many) Knoxville-area bloggers commenting on the News Sentinel's coverage of its lawsuit against Knox County Commission over the Open Meetings Law. Since the News Sentinel is a party to the suit, the objectivity of its coverage bears watching, as Editor Jack McElroy has stated. I'm happy to contribute to that effort, if even in a small way.
Jury selection begins tomorrow, and today is set aside for jurors requesting exemptions.
On Friday, Chancellor Daryl Fansler ruled on preliminary motions from both sides regarding the topics the jury will and will not be allowed to hear. These in limine motions are routine in both civil and criminal trials heard by a jury; they serve to filter out irrelevant material which would only serve to prejudice the jury.
This morning, the News Sentinel published an article which discusses the chancellor's ruling on Friday. The article opens with this paragraph:
Jurors deciding whether the Knox County Commission did public business in secret will themselves be kept in the dark about topics ranging from a commissioner’s seedy past to commissioners’ quorum defense.
Three paragraphs later, it says this:
It’s not uncommon for attorneys to try to block jurors from knowing everything there is to know about a case being tried. For instance, state law bars jurors deciding an accused rapist’s fate from knowing that he raped before — so long as he doesn’t take the witness stand and claim he is a saint.
Good grief.
First of all, the opening paragraph makes it sound like these motions are some kind of shady maneuver, when in fact, they're entirely legal and appropriate. Prejudicial and irrelevant material has to be kept out of the trial if the jury is expected to measure only the facts relevant to the case. These motions aren't about "keeping the jury in the dark" at all; that phrase implies there is some sort of attempt to deceive the jury. Rather, they're about filtering out the noise.
In the fourth paragraph, we finally get to the acknowledgment that these motions are routine. However, look at how the point is made: "it's not uncommon for attorneys to try to block jurors from knowing everything there is to know about a case being tried." Again, this implies that there is some attempt to keep relevant, germane facts out of the case. In reality, "everything there is to know about a case" includes only the facts that are relevant. Extraneous details are rightly filtered out.
Two of the examples mentioned are Commissioner Josh Jordan's involvement with a cocaine ring back in the early 1990s, when he was a teenager, and a sexual harassment case brought against Commissioner Richard Cate's former company. Neither of those situations are even remotely relevant to these proceedings, so I find it hard to understand how these could form part of "everything there is to know about" this particular case.
The kicker is the reference to a rape trial as a comparison. Although I'm sure many residents of Knox County felt violated after the events of Black Wednesday, it is purely inflammatory to compare a case in civil law such as this one to a trial involving the most heinous kind of physical assault. I think the implicit comparison is entirely out of bounds.
The way the story is laid out on the front page of today's paper, that "rape" paragraph occurs at the bottom of page A-1; the break in the article occurs immediately after it. Someone reading only the front page would end their scan of that article with the impression that County Commission will try to paint themselves as "saints" rather than the "serial rapists" the article seems to imply.
The events of Black Wednesday have riled the citizens of Knox County all year; inflammatory comparisons don't help the News Sentinel make the case that its coverage is objective, and mischaracterizations of routine motions harm its effort to ensure its reportage is purely factual.