Von Bülow Affair by William Wright

Author:William Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480484986
Publisher: Open Road Media

18

WITH all the eagerness to delve into the crime at hand it is often frustrating that pretrial motions concern themselves not with the one question in which everyone is interested—the guilt or innocence of the accused—but with whether the incriminating evidence was illegally obtained or is otherwise inadmissible. And while this may be a noble struggle from the constitutional point of view, it tends to sully the defendant’s façade of outraged innocence.

If there are legal loopholes afoot, lawyers must dive for them. While we are not supposed to think any worse of a defendant for availing himself of one of these constitutional protections—for instance, to plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and refuse to answer a question—we tend to assume such a defendant has things to hide.

It was not surprising, therefore, that Herald Fahringer moved to bar the press from the pretrial hearings. If the press remained to witness the struggle to keep certain facts and objects from the jury, this defense-repugnant evidence would be spotlighted and revealed to everyone in the world except the jurors. And they would remain ignorant only if they followed the judge’s admonition to avoid press exposure.

Even this early in the trial, the press box had an unofficial alarm-sounder. Theo Wilson, the respected New York Daily News veteran of twenty-five years, had established herself as the most sensitive to infringements of press rights. For the other journalists, she was the caged canary who would first react to constitutionally noxious fumes.

With this antipress move of Fahringer’s, not only Theo but many journalists covering the trial flapped into impressive action. The reporters of both the Boston Globe and the Providence Journal rushed to phones at the morning recess (Judge Needham forbade any entering or exiting while he was on the bench) and reported to their newspapers on the possibility that the press would be excluded.

Gayle Gertler of the Providence Journal called her boss at 10:50 A.M. at his office an hour’s drive from Newport and was told the paper would have a lawyer in the Newport courthouse by 12:15. Judge Needham recessed for lunch at noon, enabling lawyers representing three newspapers and a wire service to be on hand, ready to argue for admitting the press, when Judge Needham took the bench again at 2 P.M.

As court resumed, the interloping lawyers launched into their defense of the press with a vigor and thoroughness that suggested they did nothing but wait for calls for help from judge-threatened reporters. They invoked the traditional right of public access to courtroom proceedings, the First Amendment’s superiority to the Sixth Amendment’s guaranteeing a defendant a fair trial, an argument that irked Theo Wilson, who insisted there was no conflict between the First and Sixth Amendments.

Because Fahringer was risking antagonizing the press early in the game, he clearly felt strongly about this motion. As he argued his position, he reached levels of exasperated passion better suited to summations. He was asking only that the press be excluded for two days. (The pretrial motions required, as it turned out, seven days.

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