Opinion ID: 221342
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Experience of Public Access to TAB Hearings

Text: Our inquiry is considerably simplified by the jurisdiction the TAB shares with the Criminal Court. The fact that an alleged violator may be subject either to a court or to a TAB proceeding at the total discretion of the police officer, rather than by reference to any alleged conduct, suggests that the two forums are functionally comparable. Butz, 438 U.S. at 513, 98 S.Ct. 2894 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Richmond Newspapers test looks not to the formal description of the forum but to the historical experience in that type or kind of hearing throughout the United States. El Vocero de Puerto Rico v. Puerto Rico, 508 U.S. 147, 150, 113 S.Ct. 2004, 124 L.Ed.2d 60 (1993) (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis in the original). While the TAB's relaxed procedures and administrative placement differentiate it somewhat from the Criminal Court, the jurisdictional overlap and shared function of the two forums render them in important ways the same  type or kind of hearing. Id. Because of this, how the experience and logic inquiry comes out with respect to the Criminal Court largely determines how it comes out for the TAB as well. And, since access to criminal court hearings is the core of the entire Richmond Newspapers line of cases, a similar result for the TAB seems almost foreordained. The government cannot simply dress up a criminal trial in the guise of an administrative hearing and thereby evade the well-established requirement that criminal proceedings be open to the public. Even without the functionally equivalent Criminal Court as a guide, however, we would come to the same conclusion. The NYCTA argues that because there is no history of open access to the TAB dating back to the First Amendment, TAB proceedings cannot be presumptively open under that amendment. But the Supreme Court has instructed us to ask not whether the First Amendment was formulated with some particular forum in mind, but whether the place and process have historically been open. Press-Enterprise II, 478 U.S. at 8, 106 S.Ct. 2735. If we understood this instruction to require us to look to the physical location and institutional proceeding at issue, we might conclude, as the NYCTA urges, that the offices of the TAB and its hearings have been subject to the current access policy for the TAB's entire brief history. To take this view, however, would be to rely on precisely the kind of formalism that the Richmond Newspapers line of cases eschews. [11] The process that goes on at TAB hearings is a determination of whether a respondent has violated a Transit Authority Rule. And that process was presumptively open from the inception of the Rules system in 1966, when such proceedings were heard only in open criminal courts. [12]