I don’t blame Virginia Summers for being unsettled by the news story that appeared in The Spokesman-Review one day last fall.
She and her family didn’t need any more agony.
But neither can I fault Kevin Blocker, the reporter who wrote the story, or the editors who decided to run it.
Sometimes constitutional values butt into each other head-on. In this case, a criminal defendant’s right to a fair trial conflicted with freedom of the press.
When that happens, it’s up to the institutions involved to manage the conflict so that all rights are protected.
Summers and her family had been through a six-year ordeal, beginning on Oct. 14, 1995, when a group of assailants severely beat her son, Jeff Feagan, in a North Side parking lot.
The attack left Feagan, now 41, in a permanent, semi-vegetative state, Summers says.
In August 1997, nearly two years after the assault, Summers wrote about her frustration with the pace of justice. In a Your Turn column in The Spokesman-Review, she outlined an exasperating string of delays and postponements.
“Where is justice for my son? Or for me and my family? There is none,” she wrote.
Even when the system did begin to move, there were more setbacks.
John Swiger, one of three defendants, was tried and convicted in 1997, shortly after Summers’ column appeared. He was sentenced to prison for up to 10 years. Two other defendants had pleaded guilty and received lesser penalties.
But appellate attorneys persuaded Judge Robert Austin to grant Swiger a new trial and he was released. The anguish continued for Summers and her family.
At the retrial last November, jurors were not supposed to know about the first conviction. To insulate them from that and other possibly prejudicial information, Austin did what judges routinely do. He admonished them not to read, view or listen to any news accounts of the trial they were involved in.
The lawyers rested their cases and the jurors began their deliberations on Nov. 14. They went home that night and came back in the morning to resume.
Blocker’s story, which appeared that morning, recapped the case, including Swiger’s previous conviction. Summers, in her words, “went ballistic.”
“The first thing that popped into my mind was retrial,” she recalls.
Blocker and The Spokesman-Review had a job to do, however — inform the public about how the system of justice operates.
That’s no small duty.
“No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will,” wrote Thomas Jefferson.
By reporting what happens in court and in the halls of government, reporters such as Blocker provide the information citizens need to make their own judgments about how well the system functions.
If it takes six years and multiple trials to bring a criminal case to resolution, that’s something all citizens, not just those with a direct connection, ought to know.
Summers’ own Your Turn column in 1997 served a similar purpose.
Blocker wasn’t reckless. He waited until the case had gone to the jury before reporting on the previous trial. Had there been reason to believe the jurors wouldn’t heed Judge Austin’s instructions to ignore news accounts, lawyers had the right to request that the jury be sequestered during deliberations.
“If the jury is doing its job the way it’s supposed to, if they stay away (from news accounts) as the judge instructs, that shouldn’t affect what we write,” said Blocker.
Earlier this month, with Swiger’s sentencing date approaching, defense lawyers went to court again, looking for evidence that the Nov. 15 article had compromised the verdict.
They came up empty-handed but the experience reignited Summers’ anxiety, and she fired off an angry e-mail to The Spokesman-Review.
“The irresponsible journalism of the paper could have put us in a third trial,” she wrote. “We had already waited six years for justice to be done. Your paper could have been responsible for more anguish for all of us who love Jeff.”
State Appeals Court Justice John Schultheis, who is active in bench-bar-press activities that develop guidelines for such situations, said he thought the publication of the story was appropriate.
None of that does much to comfort Virginia Summers and others who have to sit on the sidelines and watch while the sometimes conflicting processes of governance and accountability go on side by side.
At the same time, the public’s ability to oversee its government has to be preserved too.
