Court Opinion

ID: 9624906
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 07:21:16.203557+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:56.407425
License: Public Domain

NEWMAN, J.
I concur. I agree that defendant’s rights can be safeguarded if he is certified to the adult court. We should not however, even impliedly, condone the “Rules for News Media Reporting Juvenile Court Proceedings” that were issued on behalf of the superior court’s juvenile departments on July 15, 1975. Patently they accord privileges only to “representatives of the recognized media,” and “[r]ecognized media are defined to include any of the print or broadcast media that regularly reach a significant part of the general population of Los Angeles County.” The preference thus expressed for a “recognized” press indeed may flout article I, section 2, of the California Constitution, which states that “[a] law may not restrain or abridge liberty of . . . press.”
In the rules, section 3 provides that the “name of the minor ... or his parents or guardian shall not be reported nor shall any means of ascertaining such names be disclosed”; and the final sentence warns, “The media presumably will police itself relative to the above rules, knowing that departures therefrom would necessarily call for return to strict control of "their access.” Puzzling to me is the apparent lack of policing in this case regarding the fact that “A sketch depicting a left *627profile view of the minor obtained at the arraignment was broadcasted on ... KABC-TV Channel 7, during both the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. news on , March 22, 1977.”
Finally, there may be an equal protection issue that unfortunately was analyzed neither in the briefs nor in oral argument. The United States Supreme Court has reminded us that “to transfer a child from the statutory structure of the Juvenile Court to the criminal processes ... is, indeed, a ‘critically important’ proceeding.” (Kent v. United States (1966) 383 U.S. 541, 560 [16 L.Ed.2d 84, 97, 86 S.Ct. 1045].) In some ways it parallels the transfer of an adult suspect from preliminary examination to criminal trial. Yet in that proceeding, at the request of defendant, the magistrate must “exclude from the examination every person except his clerk, court reporter and bailiff, the prosecutor and his counsel, the Attorney General, the district attorney . . ., the investigating officer, the officer having custody of a prisoner witness . . ., the defendant and his counsel, and the officer having the defendant in custody . . . .” (Pen. Code, § 868.) Those words imply no easy answer to the question raised here during oral argument, “Do we not come to the conclusion that adults get better protection than do children?”