The public will have access to the show-cause hearings for Ā 28 menĀ accused of buying sex from aĀ Greater Boston brothel network.
The clerk-magistrate at Cambridge District Court made the initial decision to hold the hearings in public. Today the Supreme Judicial Court upheld that decision.
In a 32-page opinion issued today the SJC concluded:
The clerk-magistrate acted reasonably and within the proper scope of her discretion in deciding to grant public access to the show cause hearings, based on her reasonable assessment that the Acting United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts’s announcements regarding the applications — which indicated that the accused included unidentified government officials, corporate executives, and others in positions of power, wealth, and responsibility — raised legitimate public concerns about potential favoritism and bias if such hearings were held behind closed doors, and that these concerns outweighed the interests in continued anonymity for the [defendants].
Nevertheless, the same clerk-magistrate refused to provide journalists with copies of the complaint applications filed be law enforcement. Typically, most criminal charges are based on applications submitted by the police along with a narrative of the alleged criminal conduct.
The SJC again upheld the clerk-magistrate’s decision:
We also conclude that the clerk-magistrate did not abuse her discretion in denying public access to the pending complaint applications, on the basis that disclosure of such applications prior to the show cause hearings posed a risk that extraneous or erroneous information about the accused would be disclosed, without an opportunity for the accused to address or respond to such disclosures, as would be the case at the show cause hearings.
The full text of the opinion is attached below.