Can california newspapers publish the names of juveniles charged with crimes?
Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co., 443 U.S. 97. In this 1979 case, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a (West Virginia) state law forbidding newspapers from publishing the name of any youth charged as a juvenile offender. Thus, publishing the names of even youth charged as juveniles is legal in California and in every other state (no state can make a law that contradicts U.S. federal law). The Smith case only covers the publishing of legally-obtained information, however. Some courts will use closed proceedings making it harder for media to legally obtain information (the key concept for the Smith case), but since the spate of school shootings in the 1990s, there’s been much more public pressure to loosen laws aimed at protecting juvenile offender’s identities (the idea used to be to protect identities so that juveniles could be reformed). Nowadays, it is often the media that self-police, and, with the pressure to publish to a “breaking new” culture and thereby get ratings, most elect
