Mayor was once a First Amendment defender
The Associated Press
11.29.99
NEW YORK — Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been sued two dozen times for violating the First Amendment and has lost all but a couple of cases.
But what most people don't know is that the mayor was once a First Amendment lawyer himself.
Twenty years ago, he stood in a courtroom in the Bronx, defending the freedom of the press and the public's right to know with the same vehemence he now uses to dismiss his opponents as "First Amendment hysterics."
"My argument is, you don't take the First Amendment and throw it out the window," Giuliani told Justice Howard E. Bell in state Supreme Court in the Bronx on March 20, 1979.
Giuliani, working for the law firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler and representing the New York Daily News, was advocating passionately on behalf of the News that court proceedings needed to be open to the press in the case of a 13-year-old charged with murder. The teen-ager was the first to be tried under a new law that treated certain juvenile offenders as adults.
"I'm not here arguing only because of the need to publish this information, but for a principle: The First Amendment is vital to the way our government functions ... as vital, as important as an individual's right to a fair trial," Giuliani stated, according to a transcript of the proceedings obtained by The Associated Press from court records.
In a written brief, Giuliani and a team of other lawyers also argued that the First Amendment was designed to provide "maximum access to government proceedings to permit knowledgeable public discussion of governmental affairs."
As mayor, Giuliani has been personally accessible to the media, fielding questions at open press conferences nearly every day. But reporters have also found it more difficult than under previous mayors to get information from other branches of city government.
Giuliani has also been sued on First Amendment grounds in cases ranging from restricting protests to withholding city funds from the Brooklyn Museum of Art after publicly disparaging a painting on display. One case involved a city official who was fired for speaking to the press without permission; another involved the police department's refusal to make certain documents public.
Daniel S. Connolly, a lawyer with the city Corporation Counsel who has represented the city in a number of these cases, says "the decisions made by this administration are not made against the First Amendment. They are made for independent reasons of public policy," such as restricting a demonstration that might disrupt traffic or public space.
But Public Advocate Mark Green — a longtime Giuliani critic and himself a likely candidate for mayor — recently accused Giuliani of "wasting millions of public dollars" on some 22 "free speech or information" cases, all of them unsuccessful for the city.
Giuliani has also won two high-profile First Amendment battles, succeeding in shutting down most X-rated businesses in Times Square and denying Ku Klux Klan members the right to cover their faces with hoods during a protest.
Giuliani did not prevail in the 1979 case involving the Daily News. Ultimately the state Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York, ruled that the judge in the Bronx was right to exclude the media from the courtroom on the grounds that coverage might prejudice potential jurors and deprive the young defendant of a fair trial.