Globe Newspaper Co. v. Superior Court for the County of Norfolk

The Globe case established broad rights of the press to cover trials of all types. However, in 1991, three states passed legislation restricting public disclosure of the identity of rape victims, opening the possibility that the rights of public access to criminal proceedings may again be narrowed.

In 1979, three young women in Massachusetts accused a man of "forcible rape and forced unnatural rape." At the time, two of the girls were 16 and one was 17. The girls had agreed to testify, but, as the prosecutor explained in a lobby conference before the trial, they were concerned about privacy. They were willing to have the press attend the trial, but they wanted guarantees about what would actually appear in the newspapers.

Each . . . indicated that they had the same concerns and basically they are privacy concerns. The difficulty of obtaining any kind of guarantee that the press would not print their names or where they go to school or any personal data or take pictures of them or attempt to interview them, those concerns come from their own privacy interests, as well as the fact that there are grandparents involved with a couple of these victims who do not know what happened and if they were to find out by reading the paper, everyone was concerned about what would happen then.

Massachusetts state law required that all sex-crime trials involving victims under age 18 to be closed to the public, including the press. But the Globe Newspaper Company did not agree with this law. It moved to have the closure revoked. After a long court battle, the case finally made it to the Supreme Court. Although by then, the trial in question was long over (with the defendant found not guilty), the Court decided that this was an issue that would certainly come up again. Accordingly, the Court decided to review the case in order to set future precedents.