Public should have a window into the workings of the court

They are the people’s courts, these august chambers where matters of life and death, freedom and incarceration, right and wrong, legal and illegal, guilt and innocence are hashed out.

And American courts are supposed to be models of openness. The criminal process may begin in the secrecy of a grand jury, but once cause has been found to return an indictment, the public becomes a witness to the process. Prosecutors represent the state, defense lawyers protect the rights of the defendants and a judge presides over the trial and events leading up to the trial. Openness should be the rule. And openness is particularly important when public officials are involved and when questions of possible corruption are involved.

That’s why The Vindicator was taken aback when a visiting judge acceded to the request of the defendants involved in the Oakhill Renaissance Place case to seal pretrial filings that are routinely available to public scrutiny. And it is why the paper and 21WFMJ-TV filed a motion to oppose the judge’s orders.

There are lawyers who believe that the public should not be privy to any information that can’t be admitted into evidence during a trial and submitted to the jury. They view the courtroom as an operating room where the best antiseptic is a set of arcane rules in which they’ve been schooled and of which the public is generally ignorant.

But what a judge may allow a jury to hear and what the public should be allowed to know so that it can better understand how the justice system works are two different things.

High profile case

The Oakhill case defendants include Anthony M. Cafaro Sr., former president of the Cafaro Co.; the Cafaro Co. and its affiliates, the Ohio Valley Mall Co. and the Marion Plaza Inc.; county Commissioner John A. McNally IV; county Auditor Michael V. Sciortino; former county Treasurer John B. Reardon, and former JFS Director John Zachariah.

To the extent that pretrial filings in this case give the public a better insight into what may or may not have occurred between powerful private interests and elected public officials in the conduct of Mahoning County’s business, those filings should be available to the public, as they routinely would be.

The defendants are entitled to a fair trial before an impartial jury. But conducting every aspect of this proceeding in an open way does not jeopardize that right. One of the functions of the judge is to assure that the jury being seated is impartial. If the jurors are found to have been tainted by pretrial publicity, the remedy at law is well established. Conduct the trial in a new venue, a county or two removed from whatever publicity may have given local jurors a preconceived notion of guilt or innocence.

The trial is already being held before a visiting judge, the state is represented by out-of-town prosecutors and most of the defense lawyers are from Cleveland, Pittsburgh and New York. Moving this trial — if it were deemed necessary — would be easier than most .