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Clayton Community Theatre will conclude its 24th season with Murder on the Nile by the great mystery writer Agatha Christie, directed by Nada Vaughn.   Love, money, meddling, politics, betrayal,

The post Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Nile” appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

A few minutes ago I happened to run across a Twitter screed about how screwed and abused Millennials and Gen Z are, and how they're not going to take it much longer. It was just the usual stuff, but for some reason it prompted me to check it out using the simplest possible measure. Not ...continue reading "Are Millennials happy?"

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the latest newspaper to be hit with an unconstitutional "prior restraint" prohibiting it from publishing information the government accidentally made public.

Trevis Rothwell, via Flickr

A St. Louis judge issued an unconstitutional “prior restraint” last week, prohibiting the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from reporting on a mental health evaluation of a man accused of killing a police officer. It appears the paper was able to access the evaluation after it was accidentally filed as a public document. This news came the same week a judge rejected the City of Los Angeles’s efforts to force journalist Ben Comacho to return photographs of undercover police officers released to him pursuant to a records request.

Both cases ignore that, on the rare occasion when the government has a legitimate basis to withhold records from the public, the onus is on the government, not the press, to ensure that they’re withheld. The Supreme Court has explained that “a contrary rule … would force upon the media the onerous obligation of sifting through government press releases, reports, and pronouncements to prune out material arguably unlawful for publication.”

That’s why the Court has held at least four times that once the government releases records to the press, even accidentally, it cannot claw them back or prohibit or punish their publication, regardless of how sensitive the records may be. It’s quite unusual for the Supreme Court to accept so many cases involving essentially the same legal issue, but apparently the justices wanted to make sure trial judges got the point.

Well, they didn’t. The St. Louis judge, Elizabeth Hogan, reportedly thinks her case is different from the others because she needs to protect the fair trial rights of the man who was the subject of the evaluation. But the Supreme Court has not wavered from its position even in a case where the inadvertently released records identified victims of sex crimes.

That case involved whether journalists who disclosed victims’ identities could be punished after-the-fact but Hogan went even further by prohibiting the Post-Dispatch from publishing the evaluation in the first place. That’s a prior restraint, “the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.” It’s unconstitutional even when national security is allegedly threatened. Every judge studied the Pentagon Papers case in law school but somehow they continue issuing prior restraints for even less compelling reasons.

That’s not to say that Sixth Amendment fair trial rights aren’t important. Of course they are – and the press protects those rights by informing the public of the workings of the criminal justice system. The Supreme Court instructs trial judges to deal with potential prejudice to defendants’ fair trial rights arising from media publicity through the jury selection process, or even by moving the trial elsewhere, rather than censoring journalism. And studies have shown that jurors are able to remain objective despite pretrial publicity.

But judges continue to panic about publicity and issue unlawful orders like Hogan’s. Just last year, for example, a Sarasota, Florida, judge barred a newspaper from publishing the names of deputies involved in a fatal shooting. Also last year, a judge in Colorado prohibited the Denver Gazette from publishing court documents mistakenly released to a journalist. These orders and many others were eventually lifted but only after media outlets incurred legal fees and, more significantly, important news was delayed by rogue judges’ unconstitutional antics.

Camacho, the Los Angeles journalist sued for not returning records police gave him, filed a motion under California’s anti-SLAPP (short for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) law. Hopefully the City will be sanctioned and forced to pay Camacho’s attorney’s fees for defending its frivolous lawsuit. Unfortunately, there is no similar remedy when the frivolousness comes from the bench. Maybe the Supreme Court needs to revisit this issue a fifth time. Or maybe bar associations and other power brokers in local judicial elections, in St. Louis and elsewhere, need to stop endorsing judges who don’t understand the basics of the Constitution.

URBANDALE, Iowa — Former President Donald Trump said Thursday he was confident he will continue to hold his lead in Iowa. “There’s no way I can lose Iowa,” Trump told the crowd. “We’re going to have to do some really bad things to lose at this point.” Trump spoke to a packed room at the Iowa […]

The post Former President Donald Trump comes after DeSantis on Iowa campaign trail appeared first on Missouri Independent.

The theft cost Grimm roughly $15,000, which he planned to use to fund his retirement.

Before she succumbed to her injuries, Lisa Dunnavant-Polach told her rescuers, “I have children. I’m not ready to die yet."

After a three-year absence, Ben Dressel's beloved pub returns with a brewhouse, the soon-to-be home of the Rock & Horse line of beers.

The attorney for Jackson Mahomes is requesting that the Johnson County District Court issue an order allowing documents be filed under seal regarding a battery case.

EDWARDSVILLE/BERKELY, MO. - Berkeley, Mo., Police and SIUE Police are investigating an alleged kidnapping/sexual assault of a female victim. An e-Lert was issued early Saturday morning about the case. The kidnapping allegedly occurred late Friday on the SIUE campus. The e-Lert said a woman was taken from Cougar Village by a known acquaintance and driven to north St. Louis. The Berkeley Police later confirmed this information. SIUE's e-Lert system is a text messaging service used to quickly notify faculty, staff, and student cell phones when an urgent situation occurs. The e-Lert described the suspect as about 6-foot-1 inches tall and described as a “light-skinned black male” with short hair and a patchy beard. The suspect’s vehicle was described as a gray or silver Hyundai four-door sedan, possibly with mild front-end damage." The SIUE Communications Department on Thursday released the following information: "The SIUE campus police are working with the victim and

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Thursday’s bad air quality is due to high ozone content in the ground air, as well as a lot of pollutants and allergens in the air. Orange air quality alert days are unhealthy for people with lung conditions.