Note: This article was first published in the May 1, 1985 issue of News Library News. Chamberlain shared in the winning of the 1985 Scripps Howard Freedom of Information Award for her newspaper, the Press-Enterprise. It isn't rare for news librarians to work hard to achieve results. What is unusual is that a news librarian who performed at such an outstanding level received public acknowledgement.
By Jacqueline S. Chamberlain, Assistant Library Director
Riverside Press-Enterprise
The Press-Enterprise is always involved in litigation, usually as the object. That's not unusual at a time when lawsuits rank with baseball as a national sport. Unlike most newspaper editors, however, our late Executive Editor Norman Cherniss was involved with each step of the case as any of the attorneys -- not by virtue of a license to practice, but by virtue of his deep and perceptive knowledge of both journalism and the law.
When he asked Library Director Joan Douglas for a volunteer to help with his burgeoning (and chaotic) legal files, I was drafted -- although any one of our staff of five could have done the job. We should have expected it; what began as an occasional filing and retrieval became a regular, frequent and unpredictable extension of my library work, in itself an intensive routine that includes indexing and abstracting six editions on an unfailing same-day basis.
Nothing specific about my background recommended me. Mine is the typically atypical newspaper librarian's resume, and I have neither library nor law nor journalism degrees. With a BA and MA in English from the University of California, Riverside, where I taught writing and literature for 10 years, I was a burned-out teacher when Joan hired me. (I had done some copy-editing, but that was too much like grading papers.) The two of us are the long-time survivors of the library, and there have been more changes than we care to think about in the 12 years I've been here. But there has been one important constant: the editors and staff have always trusted and supported our work.
Although the work with Norman Cherniss' files was interesting from the start, there were times when I wished someone else had the job. Not only did it mean more work and fragmentation, but Norman was a difficult, demanding teacher. He always expected me to know what he was talking about (even if I didn't), and he expected exceptional precision. Working with him was an ongoing crash course in legal jargon, procedure, citations and issues.
I read nearly everything I handled to fix it in my memory and, not incidentally, because it was interesting. As a result I could usually deduce what he really wanted and anticipate his questions. Before long we were talking to each other in shorthand, often like lawyers -- not necessarily the most graceful way to communication, but effective. Before he died last October, he was urging me to take law courses.
My job was to organize, retrieve, research and summarize clips, documents, memos and correspondence. I was called upon almost daily to find answers to his questions, and often the same questions more than once. The copy machine at the county law library became an intimate friend. Federal Express and AT&T were my buddies.
The highly eccentric system we evolved worked well only because Norman remembered every piece of paper that passed through his hands (so did I when I had handled them), and I knew how to find material, except when he lost it or loaned it out. Eventually he realized I was making "Murphy" copies of important material and thereafter he added, "and here's a (or 'make a') copy for your files" and those copies became invaluable. It took me 50 hours to organize the mass of material for others to use after his death. Ours was not a system I'd recommend, but somehow it worked.
Almost as soon as I became involved in this library-annex project I also became involved in the lawsuit that was to win a landmark Supreme Court decision, Press-Enterprise Co. v. Superior Court of California, Riverside County.
In August 1980 the California Supreme Court had handed down a decision (in Hovey v. the People of Alameda County), saying that in capital cases a judge may close to the press and public the "death qualifying" questions of voir dire -- those questions in the jury-selection process involving the potential jurors' views of the death penalty. It soon became apparent that judges, apprehensive of treading on the privacy rights of voir dire people, as well as the rights of defendants, were beginning to seize on Hovey to close voir dire not only for death penalty questions, but for a wide variety of questions involving privacy -- and even, possibly, all questions.
The Press-Enterprise, like other papers saw great danger in that trend. The very heart of the First and Sixth Amendments appeared to be threatened by the potential for barring the public from knowing how and why a potential juror had been selected in the most compelling of trials -- those involving the death penalty. The principle applies in all cases, of course, even the most trivial.
If the press, and through it the public, were barred from knowing how a jury had been selected, then the rights of both the defendant and the public were in jeopardy, especially when the transcript was sealed.
After filing to gain Supreme Court hearing in another case, the Press-Enterprise settled on the one that was viable. Albert G. Brown was accused of having raped and murdered a high school girl in Riverside, with the added emotional freight, however subtle, that he is black and she was white. For the first three days of a very long jury selection in late July 1981, the voir dire was open. Then the judge closed it for death-qualifying questions. And here was the key: he never reopened the voir dire for any other questions. The Press-Enterprise had its case, made even stronger when Judge Mortland sealed the transcript and subsequently refused to release it.
The Press-Enterprise petitioned the court of appeals (April 1982); The petition was rejected. We then asked the state Supreme Court for a hearing (June 1982); the hearing was denied. Finally in September 1982 we petitioned the U. S. Supreme Court, which in January 1983 agreed to hear the case the following October. On January 18, 1984 -- much sooner than expected -- the court ruled in favor of the Press-Enterprise, saying that the voir dire in criminal trials is covered by "the guarantees of open proceedings," and that "openness enhances both the basic fairness of criminal trial and the appearance of fairness so essential to public confidence in the criminal justice system." The court also found that there were other, and better ways of protecting both the right to fair trial and the juror's right to privacy than by closing the hearing and sealing the transcript, and suggested ways in which that could be done.
My role in the case grew as the executive editor came to depend on me to be his "law clerk" and his spare memory -- and, by extension, that of the attorneys because he worked so closely with them.
Before the paper had settled on the Brown case, Norman Cherniss asked me to research each murder case that had gone to preliminary hearing and/or jury selections and had been closed in part or all, and which had sealed transcripts for those hearings. (The issue of preliminary hearings is one we're still pursuing.)
I had both the clips and our index to work with; normally that's sufficient. But time and again I encountered those nemeses of the news library researcher: the vague reference and "write around it" syndrome. The research became equal parts reading, digesting, correlating, analyzing -- and deduction. Detective work became a specialty.
All of the potentially useful information I had gleaned then had to be charted in a way that made it accessible for frequent updating and tracking, and the information in the charts had to be as detailed as possible to provide quick answers to any number of predictable, and unpredictable, questions. Anticipating questions is one of the library's long suits.
I hope the newsroom never gets wind of this: I spent hours of my own time on the project, holing up in my den for a solid weekend, to draw up the final charts. It was the only way I could avoid constant interruption. (That work ultimately paid off, but I'm not sure my family always thought so.)
Norman, and through him or attorneys, used information I extrapolated from the charts throughout the pursuit of the Brown case (known in-house as Press-Enterprise I). The summary of information on voir dire in county murder cases between August 1980 and April 1983 was used in condensed form for a quarter-page footnote in our brief to the Supreme Court, documenting the trend in closing jury selection.
Throughout the case I continued to find, compile and analyze information -- and to find everything again when it became lost in the growing piles of documents, ultimately at least two feet high. At the same time I was making increasingly frequent trips to the county law library for case law and journal articles both on press access and on strategy in petitioning and arguing before the Supreme Court, locating and getting copies of case law and articles from other law libraries across the country (and also on Lexis). And there always, almost daily, the three-or-four-tiered questions, not only for that particular case, but for all the other litigation as it waxed and waned.
That I was included by our Editor-Publisher Howard H. Hays in the Scripps-Howard Foundation's Edward Willis Scripps Award for Freedom of Information, awarded to the Press-Enterprise for that landmark case on April 3 is a rare recognition of a news librarian's efforts. While the work I did may have been unusual, there is no question that it was a direct outgrowth of the work and reputation of our library.