Newspaper seeks unsealing of report on disbarred judge

The Knoxville News Sentinel has filed a motion to intervene in a high-profile case where the court has sealed documents involving a disbarred former judge, arguing that there is no valid legal basis for keeping the records from public view.

In the motion filed last week, the News Sentinel wrote that it is seeking to intervene on behalf of the public to “remove the shroud of secrecy” surrounding a challenge to the former judge’s convictions of four defendants in an infamous double torture-slaying case.

Former Knox County Judge Richard Baumgartner, a few years after presiding over the murder trials, was alleged to have been abusing hundreds of prescription pain pills he bought from a felon who was under his supervision in drug court.

Baumgartner has since pleaded guilty to official misconduct and was disbarred. The four defendants convicted in the murder case -- one to the death penalty, two to life without parole, and another to 53 years in prison -- are seeking a new trial based on these revelations.

But the documents likely at the center of the defendants’ challenge, specifically a Tennessee Bureau of Investigations inquiry that resulted in the judge’s disbarment, were deemed admissible as evidence but placed under seal by Special Judge Jon Kerry Blackwood, who is presiding over the motions for a new trial in which the News Sentinel is seeking to unseal documents.

According to the newspaper's attorney Richard Hollow, the judge allowed the documents to be kept from public view without proper notice, a motion to seal or articulated reasons for sealing the records.

Hollow, writing in a memorandum supporting the newspaper’s motion to intervene and unseal the records, explained that to cloak this report in secrecy permits the defense and state prosecutors to essentially debate the evidence for a new trial in secret, an “error of constitutional proportions…. [that] invites public suspicion and public distrust and further erodes public confidence in a judicial system that has already been tarnished by admitted misconduct of one of its members.”

Part of the issue revolves around the fact that the criminal investigative files of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations (TBI) are specifically exempted by a state statute from public disclosure unless a court orders the records to be opened to the public.

The News Sentinel is arguing that the Baumgartner probe, rumored to be 1,200 pages long, is no longer an investigative record because the inquiry is closed and the judge has already pleaded guilty to judicial misconduct and drug offenses, thus not interfering with his right to a fair trial, according to the memorandum.

The memorandum also contends that because the files have been admitted as evidence in court that they are subject to at least a common law right of access, a standard under which parties must articulate specific, on the record findings that outweigh the public’s interest in viewing the records.

News Sentinel Editor Jack McElroy explained in a column that the defendants asking for a new trial in this case were tried at historic taxpayer expense and involved in protracted and painful proceedings that “defined justice in this community.” Now that the resolution to the horrific case is being contested and a veteran judge’s conduct put in question, he continued, any decision made in the motion to grant a new trial is of overwhelming civic importance.

“…It’s easy to see who is harmed by the secrecy: the citizen, who is paying for every step of the process and whose faith in the judicial system rests on it being fair and open,” he wrote. “In such cases, a responsible newspaper must act on behalf of the public, and that is why the News Sentinel filed to intervene in the case last week.”

The News Sentinel has previously gone to court to unseal the records in a separate case involving former judge Baumgartner’s prescription drug abuse in June. The newspaper won the right to access certain records in the case of the probationer who allegedly sold pills to the judge, but the documents in that case did not include the bureau's report.

Blackwood, who presided over the June case, said in a “stunningly candid speech” that he sealed those records to protect the integrity of the convictions in the double murder trials, not his one-time colleague, according to previous reporting by the News Sentinel.

Hollow said that though he is hopeful that the News Sentinel will gain access to the records in the latest case, that the bureau report presents a different challenge because the investigations are normally exempt from the state’s open records laws. He said that the court may deny them access to the report, which the defense said had “overwhelming” evidence of misconduct, on those grounds or only allow them access to the portions of the report deemed relevant to the motion for a new trial. In the case of a complete denial, the News Sentinel will file an interlocutory appeal.

An interlocutory appeal is an appeal of a specific issue heard by a higher court before the underlying proceeding is fully resolved.

The judge is expected to make a ruling on the newspaper’s motion to intervene before the hearings on the motions for new trials set for Dec. 1 and 2.

Co-defendants Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas and Vanessa Coleman are all seeking new trials based on revelations found in the bureau report that one defense attorney called so damning as to require automatic reversals of the convictions for their roles in a Knoxville double murder, according to the News Sentinel.

The four were convicted for the carjacking and killing of Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, a couple who were carjacked and held captive, tortured and killed. Newsom was repeatedly sodomized and was shot in the back of the head, neck and back and then set on fire near railroad tracks that ran next to the house, according to testimony reported by the News Sentinel. Christian was repeatedly raped, had a chemical poured down her throat and body thought to be used to get rid of DNA evidence, and then stuffed into trash bags where she suffocated, according to medical examiner who testified at the trial.

If the motions for a new trial are granted, the four convicted defendants will again go on trial for the murders where they could be convicted of lesser charges or acquitted.