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This 1975 ruling settled a case involving a Georgia law that banned news organizations from publishing, airing or otherwise making known the names of victims of sexual assault in conjunction with reporting the crime's prosecution. The High Court determined the law was unconstitutional, in violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing freedom of the press; it also found it …
In 1971 a 17-year--old Georgia high school student named Cynthia Leslie Cohn died of suffocation after being sexually assaulted by six teenaged boys in Sandy Springs. Because of the shocking nature of the crime, intense media coverage was given to the criminal proceedings. When five of the defendants went to trial in April of 1972, Atlanta television station WSB-TV assigned Thomas Wassell to cover…
The crux of the arguments presented by Cox Broadcasting's attorneys involved the right to make the details of criminal proceedings known to the public. It was, of course, permissible for the press to report on just such government proceedings--in the 1947 Craig v. Harney decision, Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his opinion that "a trial is a public event. What transpires in the court room is …
In a 6-1 vote, the High Court overturned the Georgia law that prohibited news outlets from broadcasting or printing the name of a rape victim, deeming it a violation of the First Amendment. Furthermore, it also held that a suit for damages on the basis of invasion of privacy--which Cohn had requested--in this case was not applicable. In his opinion, Justice White wrote that states may not impose l…
The Supreme Court decision in Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn effectively nullified the Georgia statute, but the issue was far from settled. "[T]he reality of the law," wrote Martin Arnold in the New York Times a few days after the ruling, "is such that lawyers who defended newspapers in privacy cases will now bring appeals based on the broader words of the ruling, hoping finally to inch the Court …
In the spring of 1991 a member of the Kennedy political family, William Kennedy Smith was accused of sexual assault in Palm Beach, Florida. When the criminal case came to trial later that year, television coverage of the proceedings initially obscured the female victim's face with a blue blob. Then, a local tabloid published her name after a foreign newspaper had done so, under the lurid headline …
On 6 March 1983, a gang rape took place in Big Dan's Tavern in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The resulting trial convicted four men of aggravated rape, spurring national debate as to whether a woman's independent or compromising behavior made her partially responsible for sexual crimes committed against her. The aggravated rape of a 21-year-old mother of two had some questioning why the woman was in…
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