BREAKING: Court 'anticipates' April 17 Tyler Robinson hearing, with witnesses, will be open to cameras

Judge Tony Graf said on Friday that he "anticipates" an upcoming hearing regarding Tyler Robinson, the man charged with assassinating Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk during a Utah campus stop in September, will be open to press. He also denied two motions and half-denied a motion from the defense to classify their motion to preclude electronic coverage.  

The April 17 hearing will include witnesses, the parties said. Graf said that "the presumption is that it will be open" regarding the next scheduled court date for Robinson. "The anticipation is it will be an open hearing, and again, if there is a portion that dictates that closure is appropriate after balancing all the factors, then there will be a closed portion," Graf said. 

The defense had argued regarding its motion to classify that Robinson had been subjected to "prejudicial pretrial publicity" from figures such as the president. The defense said that they moved to classify the motion because "we don't want to be in a position of inflicting another wound on Mr. Robinson’s right to a fair and impartial jury by republicizing, either right now in arguing this motion or on the 17th when the court hears from us, what the nature and extent of that pretrial publicity is."

He said that the "main concern" for the defense was the "tendency in this case for the press to, first of all, highlight all of the prejudicial information." He cited one news story in which it "focuses on let’s repeat for our audience, in a very dramatic fashion, all of the prejudicial statements made by politicians, from the president on down, characterizing Mr. Robinson as an animal, characterizing him as evil, characterizing him as deserving of the death penalty. And they string together all these quotes and rebroadcast them."

"So we don't want to be in that position of putting in front of the court all of this prejudicial information, then having the press regurgitate it yet one more time, and reinflicting the wound that we're seeking to avoid."

He said that not classifying the motion could affect the jury selection process, saying that the court could voir dire, or screen, a jury "on whether they’ve heard the President of the United States say that Mr. Robinson should be executed, and you can exclude that juror from serving on this case, but given the demographics of this country, you’re going to be excluding a large portion of the population, and then when you add to that the death qualification process, you no longer end up with a representative jury."

The state said in regards to the motion to classify, "this idea of where there's so much media coverage that it’s, you got to necessarily find that there's some prejudice. I don't know that it necessarily works that way. I think that the fact that media coverage becomes so pervasive can also tend to dilute the effects of that media coverage. Because when something becomes a constant drone, people tend, a lot of people tend to tune it out. Now, for sure, there'll be people that are fixated on this case, but we weed those out through careful questioning during voir dire. And I also point out that not all media reports in this case have been unfavorable to the defendant and favorable to the state. It's gone both ways here. There's media that the state's concerned about as well."

A representative of the media on the matter said, "So if the motion to exclude is kept private, well that's saying to the public is, you can't have access to information that you in fact, created. Similarly, the court cannot prohibit the public from this information that is already public, that is a prior restraint on speech. If there is news articles, if there are comments from public officials, the news has a right to report on that. The court cannot control that."