Journalist's Guide

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  Key Players
  Information Sources
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Glossary

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First, a Word About Judges as Sources

When a question about a case arises, a journalist's natural instinct is to call the judge handling the matter. After all, who could provide a more accurate, authoritative answer? This is almost always a bad idea.

Federal judges are bound by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which requires that they "avoid public comment on the merits of pending or impending actions" in cases before them or on appeal. You can find the Code online at http://www.uscourts.gov/guide/vol2/ch1.html. Some federal judges will respond, or have a court employee respond, to a journalist's questions about procedural aspects of a case, but some judges refuse to be interviewed by journalists on any topic. (The same rules will apply to those judges' secretaries and law clerks.)

That is not to say you can never speak with a federal judge. Many judges speak at or attend bar association programs and other public events, at which it is perfectly appropriate to introduce yourself. Some also will talk informally to journalists about non case-related matters. If you are new to covering a federal court, it would not hurt to call the judge's chambers and ask if you can drop by simply to say hello.

So Who's Your Go-To Source?

If the judge is off-limits, to whom do you turn? Particularly if the federal courthouse is your full-time beat, you'll need someone when all other sources of information fail. That person probably works in the clerk's office.

A few courts have public information officers (PIOs) who deal with the news media on a daily basis. Most courts, however, do not have such an officer. Absent a PIO, the district executive, clerk of court or division manager should be able to help. They often designate a member of the clerk's staff, or some other court employee, as a contact person for the news media. For routine information about a case – when's the next hearing date, for instance – the docket clerks who staff the clerk's office front counter may be your best sources.

The Court's Docket

If you are the federal court beat reporter, you will need to keep abreast of all the noteworthy cases on the court's docket. Every district court has a web site, and some include a schedule of trials, motion hearings, pleas, and arraignments. Otherwise, you will need to visit the clerk's office on a daily basis to see the schedule. Many courts keep it in a large day planner on the front desk of the clerk's office.

Each court also keeps a list of all criminal and civil cases filed by date. They are often referred to as "the running lists." The Party/Case Index System on the PACER system provides electronic indices of cases in every federal district court. (See description of PACER in Pleadings, Orders, and Opinions.)

If you're only following a single high-profile case, your task is much easier. Early in the case, the judge will issue a scheduling order, setting out the dates motion papers must be filed, pretrial hearings will be held, and the trial will start.

Pleadings, Orders, and Opinions

All federal trial courts have computerized dockets. The docket lists the date and a brief description of all filings by the parties and all actions by the court in a particular case. You can access the dockets free of charge at terminals in the clerk's office.

The feature also allows the public to view the full text of those pleadings over the Internet through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. PACER already allows you to view the docket of any federal case (but not the full texts of pleadings and opinions) from any computer with Internet access. PACER is current as of the previous day’s close of business. It may not help if you need to report about a filing the day it occurs. The charge for looking at and printing out documents in PACER is minimal – eight cents per page of information, with a cap of $2.40 no matter how long a document is. Users of PACER need to register for a password that will allow access to the system.

If there is no electronic access to the full text of pleadings and opinions in your court, your only other option is the paper case file itself. It normally is in the clerk's office, but a few days before the trial begins, it may be sent to the judge's chambers for the duration of the case. You will be out of luck unless you can persuade a court employee to track it down and let you borrow it for a few minutes. Sometimes, attorneys involved in the case will provide you with copies of relevant case documents.

For cases that draw massive amounts of media attention, some courts have found it is more efficient to post the case documents on their web sites, providing free access. A court web site can automatically send reporters e-mails whenever a new document is added to the high-profile case's docket.

Reporters working on daily deadlines should know the difference between filing and docketing a document.

• Filing occurs when the document is handed over by the lawyer to the clerk’s office to be time/date stamped as being received.
• Docketing occurs when notice of its filing is added to the case docket by a clerk’s office staff. In most clerk's offices, a document is considered public information once it has been docketed. (A lag – of a few minutes to more than a day – can exist between filing and docketing.) If time is of the essence, you may want to get documents directly from the lawyers as soon as they are filed, rather than waiting for them to be docketed by staff in the clerk's office. Be aware, however, that in most instances a document will not be considered part of the court's official record until it appears on the docket.

Court Rules

Each district and bankruptcy court has its own set of local rules, which address procedural matters not uniformly governed by the Federal Rules of Procedure. In some jurisdictions, individual judges also have a set of rules that govern the cases in their courtrooms. Both are generally posted on the court's web site.

The court's local rules, in particular, often contain important information about covering the courthouse. For instance, a growing number of federal courts have banned cell phones, pagers, Palm Pilots, and Blackberry devices from their courthouses.

During the course of a case, you will hear and read references to a variety of other rules. The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, Federal Rules Civil Procedure, Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure, and Federal Rules of Evidence set forth the general procedural requirements for litigating cases in federal courts. You also will need to be familiar with some federal laws, which are collected in the United States Code. Provisions of the United States Constitution also may be mentioned.

Sealing of Documents

Although neither the Freedom of Information Act nor the Privacy Act applies to the Judiciary, information received by the court is publicly available unless sealed by statute, rule, or order of the court.

Statutes provide for sealing documents in specific proceedings, such as juvenile and grand jury proceedings. More generally, a federal rule of civil procedure provides for protective orders during discovery to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense. Similarly, bankruptcy court records are public and open to examination except that the court may protect commercial information or protect a person "with respect to scandalous or defamatory matter."

There are no statutes or federal rules that provide guidance for when a court should or should not seal documents in cases not specifically covered by a statute or a rule. Courts sometimes have sealed documents that contain sensitive material, such as classified information affecting national security.

An entire case may be sealed at the opening of a case, or certain docket entries may be sealed during the course of the proceedings. These cases or documents generally are listed on the docket but with the notation that the information is sealed.

Judges' Biographical Information

The Federal Judicial Center, which is the federal court's educational and research agency, lists on its web site brief biographies of all Article III judges since the country was founded.

Broadcasting the Trial

Trials and other courtroom proceedings are generally open to the public. No federal trial court, however, permits broadcasting of its proceedings. News organizations may intervene in high-profile cases to make a motion to allow broadcasting the trial. No such motion ever has been granted.

The biggest stumbling block to broadcasting federal trials is Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 53, which says the court shall not permit the taking of photographs in the courtroom during judicial proceedings or the broadcasting of judicial proceedings from the courtroom. Members of Congress on occasion have introduced bills that would give federal trial judges the discretion to allow broadcasting trials. To date, none has been enacted.

There are two types of exceptions to this prohibition that are worth noting, though neither provides video for public broadcast:

• In the trial of Timothy McVeigh, who was charged with bombing the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995, Congress passed a law that required the federal court hearing the case in Denver to set up a closed-circuit viewing location for relatives of the victims in Oklahoma City.
• In cases where a single courtroom will not hold all spectators, some federal courts, at the presiding judge's discretion, have piped a closed-circuit video feed of the proceedings into an adjacent room, which can double or triple the number of spectators accommodated.

You will need to check where, if anywhere, in the courthouse you are allowed to have a cell phone, pager, tape recorder, or other electronic device.

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