Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Ohio media coverage of criminal cases

The Ohio Supreme Court yesterday morning barred Henry County Court of Common Pleas Judge Keith P. Muehlfeld from enforcing a "gag order" prohibitting the news media from publishing or broadcasting stories about the proceedings in an upcoming manslaughter trial until after a jury has been impaneled for the separate trial of a second defendant charged in the same incident. ( Court's holding and summary )

The case in which the gag order was issued involved the death of a child, for which the state had charged the child's mother, Jayme Schwenkmeyer, and her boyfriend, David Knepley, with manslaughter and child endangering. The charges arose from a joint indictment, but the Henry County Court of Common Pleas granted the defendants' motions that they be tried separately.

Judge Muehlfeld originally scheduled Knepley's jury trial to begin on July 20, 2009, the Court's opinion says, "with Schwenkmeyer's jury trial to begin on July 27, 2009. On July 20, Judge Muehlfeld granted a Schwenkmeyer motion to prohibit print and broadcast media from reporting about the trial proceedings in Knepley's case until the jury was impaneled for Schwenkmeyer’s trial, although he permitted members of the media to have access to the Knepley trial. The judge stated in the entry that he considered the order necessary to prevent the tainting of the jury pool in the second case… Both cases were subsequently rescheduled, and the order of the trials was reversed, with Schwenkmeyer’s trial to begin on December 7, 2009, and Knepley’s trial to follow a couple months later, on February 8, 2010.

With the order in which the trials were to be heard now reversed, the blackout was modified to apply to Schwenkmeyer's trial and until a jury had been impaneled for Knepley.

The Toledo Blade, on January 27, 2010, filed action for a writ of prohibition to prevent Judge Muehlfeld, from restraining it "from speaking or publishing information that [it]has lawfully obtained or will lawfully obtain in the course of the criminal proceeding."

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