Posted: November 4, 2004 at 12:45 p.m.
Updated: November 4, 2004 at 3:35 p.m. REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) -- The judge in Scott Peterson's murder trial ruled Thursday against allowing live television coverage of the verdict, citing concerns for the defendant's and victim's families.
Also Thursday, Judge Alfred A. Delucchi ruled that transcripts from the many private meetings with attorneys held in the judge's chambers throughout the trial will remain sealed.
"The defendant's right to a fair trial trumps the public's need to know," Delucchi said in making his rulings.
Meanwhile, jurors continued deliberating Peterson's fate after getting the case Wednesday afternoon.
"The public has not seen what has happened in this trial in a way that only can be seen over television," argued media attorney Rochelle Wilcox during the open court hearing Thursday.
"I can't predict what's going to happen here," Delucchi said. "Emotions are running very high in this case."
The judge had previously agreed to allow television coverage of the verdict until attorneys on both sides of the case filed a joint motion opposing it. He then reversed his earlier ruling.
"I think we're interested more in this verdict as a spectacle rather than for the public's confidence in the judicial system," Delucchi told Wilcox. "I'm not here to orchestrate this trial. I'm here to try this case."
Prosecutor Dave Harris supported the judge's ruling.
"They're going to focus in on someone's grief, someone's anguish and that has nothing to do with teaching what the legal system is all about," Harris told the judge.
The verdict will, however, be captured on an audio feed, the judge ruled.
The judge also denied Wilcox's motion to unseal the transcripts from in-chambers meetings.
"It's well established that these proceedings are required to be public," Wilcox said. "The public needs to understand that the process is fair ... It needs to be open and it needs to be visible."
"I keep hearing about the public's need to understand," Delucchi countered. "But you know what this case is about, you know about all the pretrial publicity ... You know about the ongoing publicity ... and you know the court has to balance the defendant's right to a fair trial against the public's need to know."
Delucchi said many of the in-chambers meetings have been about evidentiary issues that the jury should not hear about in case they are ignoring the judge's rules to avoid media coverage of the trial.
"As this case was being tried, newly discovered evidence was coming in ... Some of this stuff turned out to have no evidentiary value. I don't see any point in throwing it out there in the hopes that this would not get back to the jury," Delucchi said.
"I'm trying to preserve the integrity of this trial," he said, adding that the transcripts "can be unsealed upon the direction of a reviewing court."
Peterson faces two counts of murder in the deaths of his wife, Laci, and the fetus she carried. Prosecutors claim Peterson killed his wife around Christmas Eve 2002, then dumped her weighted body into San Francisco Bay. Her badly decomposed remains and those of the fetus were discovered four months later, not far from where Peterson claims to have been fishing alone the day she vanished.
Defense lawyers claim someone else abducted and killed the Modesto woman, then placed the bodies in the water.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)