Judges Dim the Media Spotlight

Weeks later, however, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department still would not confirm that it had raided the home, or even that the search had taken place. Were the neighbors hallucinating?

"I just can't talk about it," sheriff's spokesman Chris Pappas said.

News organizations reported that the Santa Barbara department conducted the search, but they quoted anonymous or secondhand sources. A judge had sealed the warrant, the official record of what went on.

The reason for the covert treatment: The Calabasas operation concerned a celebrity case: the prosecution of pop star Michael Jackson on child molestation charges.

Secrecy has become common in A-list court proceedings. When a headliner lands in the dock, the government is increasingly restricting access to legal documents and hearings and imposing gag orders to silence lawyers and investigators.

Open courts and public scrutiny of the justice system are cornerstones of American democracy. But judges say the hush-hush measures are sometimes necessary to prevent news coverage from influencing the jury and thus damaging the prospects of a fair trial.

"It's a balancing," said David Horwitz, a recently retired judge who helped set access rules for the Los Angeles Superior Court during his 22 years on the bench. "Some judges believe that by issuing gag orders, by sealing documents, you preserve the information for the courtroom and the trial."

Prosecutors and defense lawyers often agree.

"It's partly because of a very substantial increase in the amount of coverage," said E. Michael McCann, district attorney for Milwaukee County, Wis., who prosecuted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in 1992. He pointed to a boom in gavel-to-gavel trial reporting by cable outlets such as Court TV.

"There seems to be an insatiable appetite for these trials," McCann said. "Trial by jury is not entertainment."

Jack Earley, president of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, an association of defense lawyers, said: "In some cases, there is an interest in not having everything going out to the public."