Our big day in court has come and gone. Now we await a decision.

Click below to hear the full arguments made yesterday before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court — from our lawyers as well as counsel for CPCS and the Norfolk County District Attorney’s office — regarding challenges to WBUR/OpenCourt’s free press rights.

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Click photo to view the video of yesterday's proceedings released by the Supreme Judicial Court. (Windows Media or VLC player required)

The central issue at stake is a First Amendment question of whether the state can order a news organization to redact material that has been presented publicly in an open courtroom.

Two separate cases, one brought by the DA’s office and one by the public defenders, moved their way up to the SJC through an appeals process and were conglomerated into one case heard yesterday.

Lawyers for CPCS and the state argued that because OpenCourt’s audio comes from the existing Quincy District Court audio feed and the court has allowed journalists to operate in its First Session on a daily basis, OpenCourt’s video archives are documents of the court and not property of WBUR. In this way, they argued, the court should ultimately have control over what is published online and redacted.

Our legal team argued that we legally recorded the hearings as a journalistic entity and made the case for our First Amendment rights against prior restraint. There is strong and lengthy precedent against the government preventing journalists from publishing information or media that is in their possession.

And unlike what counsel for the Commonwealth Varsha Kukafka said in her closing argument, we do not intend to publish sensitive information about an alleged minor victim of sexual violence. We’ve been transparent that we will voluntarily redact (and have redacted) mistaken blurts, including inappropriate victim information and/or names of minors. The issue at stake is whether we are in control of the videos we possess, or whether the state is.

Missing from the hearing include two of the seven SJC justices — Justice Robert Cordy and Justice Barbara Lenk — who recused themselves because of their positions on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Judiciary-Media Committee.

Read more coverage of the case from the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, the Boston Globe and WBUR.

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