On Sept. 9, the front page of The Connecticut Post, a daily paper based in Bridgeport, was dominated by a story about the jury selection process in a court case that involved the death penalty. Accompanying the story was an illustration of 18 empty chairs with personal information about each juror, like their name, hometown and occupation.
On Sept. 10, a Connecticut Superior Court judge, Robert J. Devlin Jr., excused one juror and one alternate after they expressed concern for their personal safety. The defendant’s lawyer asked for a mistrial based on what the paper wrote, but his request was denied.
Did the paper do wrong? No, says James H. Smith, editor of The Connecticut Post, which is owned by the MediaNews Group.
The law does not prohibit the publication of jurors’ names, though sometimes judges will decide not to make the names public. That did not happen in this case, and MariAn Gail Brown, the reporter, said that everyone involved knew that she was working on such an article.
Her editor, Mr. Smith, offers no apologies. “The U.S. Constitution calls for a public trial with an impartial jury,” he said. “How do you know if the jury is impartial if you don’t know who they are and something about them?”
Given the facts of the case, however, the jurors may have had reason to fear retribution: the defendant, Russell Peeler Jr., was convicted of ordering his younger brother to kill 8-year-old Leroy Brown and his mother, Karen Clarke, in 1999. Leroy Brown had been meant to testify against Mr. Peeler for killing his mother’s boyfriend. The jury was to decide if Mr. Peeler should spend life in prison or die by lethal injection.
In an article published by The Connecticut Post, Mr. Peeler’s lawyer, Erskine McIntosh, spoke out against the paper, accusing it of “journalistic misconduct.”
He also said, “I can barely put into words my disgust with The Connecticut Post.”
Some less partial observers — journalism professors — also said they thought the paper may have shown poor judgment.
Publishing the jurors’ names could expose them to pressure from advocates on both sides of the death penalty, said Christopher Hanson, who teaches journalism ethics at the University of Maryland. Newspapers need to balance the public’s right to know with the potential risk of harm to jurors, he said.
One alternative would have been to have given substantive details about the jurors, but no names, said Robert M. Steele, a faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school.
The newspaper also could have waited until the proceedings were complete, he said.
As for Mr. Smith, the editor, said if he had it to do over again, he would have skipped the illustration. “I’d let the story speak for itself,” he said.
