The Bar: Calm Down

THE BAR

To hear some papers complain, the American Bar Association’s new guidelines on press coverage of criminal cases will repeal the First Amendment and return the Inquisition. Some lawyers have cited the rules in attempts to get trials closed to reporters. Exasperated, the author of the guidelines, Massachusetts Judge Paul Reardon, has advised everyone to calm down.

Writing in the A.B.A. Journal, Reardo explains that the standards “in no way inhibit public release by prosecutors or police of the full facts and the circumstances of an arrest or of a charge of crime.” The main target of the standards is uncalled-for opinions such as that of a police officer who says a suspect is guilty. And the rules “do not restrict the news media from disseminating information developed through their own initiative or resources about crimes committed or about the administration of justice.”