Judge releases transcript after challenge from KHQ
CdA boy’s hearing was held in private
A Kootenai County magistrate judge released the transcript of the preliminary hearing for a 15-year-old boy charged with two counts of murder after Spokane television station KHQ challenged the judge’s decision to bar the public and media from the hearing and withhold the written account of the proceedings.
Magistrate Clark A. Peterson last April closed the hearing for Eldon Samuel III after the boy’s public defender argued that sensitive information disclosed at the hearing could prejudice his right to a fair trial and affect his chances for rehabilitation. Peterson said hearings for juveniles don’t share the same legal expectation for openness as hearings for adults. Samuel was 14 when he was arrested and charged with killing his father and younger brother last March in Coeur d’Alene.
Attorney Joel Hazel with Witherspoon Kelley, representing the television station, challenged Peterson’s decision. Hazel argued that Idaho law and state court precedent support keeping the hearing open and that no evidence justifying closing the hearing had been presented to the court, as the law requires.
After the hearing was held in private last June, 1st District Court Judges Benjamin Simpson and Richard Christensen, in separate rulings, found that the hearing transcript should be unsealed in the interest of public disclosure.
In Idaho, the public has a qualified right to attend preliminary hearings, Christensen said. Peterson’s ruling seemed more concerned with how the “salacious nature of the allegations” would affect Samuel, rather than balancing the public’s right to an open court against the defendant’s right to a fair trial, Christensen said.
Kootenai County Public Defender John Adams went to the Idaho Supreme Court to try to keep the court document from being made public, but the justices this month allowed for the release of 278 pages of transcript from the two-day preliminary hearing.
Samuel’s trial is scheduled to begin March 2 and is expected to last about two weeks, according to court filings.
KHQ is owned by Cowles Co., which also owns The Spokesman-Review.