Judge to hear Hernandez document-unsealing case on Friday

FALL RIVER — A Superior Court judge will hear arguments Friday over whether documents should be sealed that pertain to a juror in the Aaron Hernandez trial who may have been exposed to prejudicial information during deliberations.

Hernandez’s attorneys say keeping those documents sealed is necessary to safeguard the integrity of their inquiry into the unnamed juror. However, GateHouse Media, the publisher of The Herald News, The Enterprise, Taunton Daily Gazette and The Patriot Ledger, argues that the public has a right to review post-verdict proceedings, including information about a juror possibly being exposed to information outside of the courtroom.

“Hernandez’s wholesale sealing of post-verdict motion papers in this instance has effectively reversed the public’s presumptive rights of public access to judicial documents,” Gatehouse Media attorneys Michael J. Grygiel and Zachary C. Kleinsasser wrote in a letter in advance of their formal motion, filed Monday, opposing the defense request for impoundment.

Grygiel and Kleinsasser said state and federal case law supports the newspapers’ argument that, barring “some compelling justification,” all proceedings related to the juror issue and the underlying court records must be made public.

They note a similar 1990 case, Globe Newspaper Company v. Commonwealth, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that there is no principled basis for affording greater confidentiality to post-trial documents and proceedings than what is given to pretrial matters. That case concerned information relating to a juror’s alleged exposure to extraneous matter during trial that may have prejudiced the jury’s deliberations.

Superior Court Judge E. Susan Garsh, the presiding judge in the Hernandez case, represented the Globe Newspaper Co. in the 1990 case when she was an attorney in private practice.

In a counter-motion, filed Wednesday, opposing GateHouse Media’s request, Hernandez’s attorneys, James L. Sultan and Michael K. Fee, argue that the newspaper company’s “prodigious and tendentious blizzard of paper misses the mark in several key aspects.” In their motion, Sultan and Fee differentiate between what they say is the Constitutional right to court proceedings and the common law practice of granting public access to court documents.

“There is no First Amendment right of public access to court records,” say Sultan and Fee, who argue that the court can seal court records by a showing of good cause.

Garsh will hear arguments beginning at 9 a.m. in Bristol County Superior Court, where Hernandez, 25, the former New England Patriots star tight end, was convicted April 15 of first-degree murder following a 10-week trial.