Court Opinion

ID: 9582073
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:22:07.641946+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:37:25.805751
License: Public Domain

McGraw, Justice,

concurring:

The majority deserves accolades for their recognition that our state Constitution guarantees the public and thereby the press a right of access to judicial proceedings. The error in its well-crafted opinion is that it limits, albeit in narrow circumstances, the people’s right of such access.
As the majority opinion notes, the United States Supreme Court in Gannet v. DePasquale, 433 U.S. 368, 61 L.Ed.2d 608, 99 S.Ct. 2898 (1979), found no right of public access to pretrial criminal proceedings. This finding was essential to the Gannet holding if the Court was to avoid firmly ruling on the delicate issue of conflicting constitutional rights. This Court, however, finds a state constitutional right of access but unnecessarily places it in conflict with the right to a fair trial.
*119The right of access to governmental proceedings and the right to a fair trial do not conflict. The judicial article of the Constitution charges this Court to devise procedures and remedies to ensure fair trials. W.Va. Const, art. 8, § 3. The Court is not empowered to abridge constitutional guarantees to that end. Traditional judicial techniques are more than equal to the task. The majestic literature of common law jurisprudence bears windy witness to the flexibility of judicial device and to the boundless promise of judicial ingenuity.
The public is entitled to know how its government operates in order to secure it against “the danger of maladministration” spoken of in article 3, section 3 and to ensure that officials, even judges, remain true to their trust as servants of the people. W.Va. Const, art. 3, § 2, § 3.
Our Bill of Rights does not anticipate superior and inferior classes of rights and it is improperly, even unlawfully presumptuous for us to suggest that the abridgment of one is necessary to the preservation of another.