A follow-up to my post on Prop 8 proponents’ motion for an order compelling former district judge Vaughn Walker to cease further disclosures of the video recordings of the anti-Prop 8 trial and to return any copies that are in his possession:

Walker submitted a letter yesterday in response to the motion. In his letter, Walker acknowledges that he took a full set of the video recordings with him when he retired from the court and re-entered private life. He also acknowledges that he used a three-minute excerpt of the recordings, consisting of cross-examination of an expert witness for the Prop 8 proponents, in one public presentation before he retired (on February 28)—the University of Arizona speech that he knew was videotaped by C-SPAN for broadcast—and that he has already used the same excerpt in two public presentations since his retirement (with a third planned use scheduled for next week).

Walker has thus confirmed the factual basis for Prop 8 proponents’ charge that he has violated his own order placing the video recordings under seal, that he has violated the Northern District of California’s local rules barring transmission of trial proceedings beyond “the confines of the courthouse,” and that he has acted in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling barring broadcast of the trial proceedings—a ruling that weighed heavily, in its balance of equities, the threat of harm and harassment that pro-Prop 8 witnesses would face from broadcast.

What legal defense does Walker offer? Walker simply asserts that he “decided that in the presentation on February 18 at the University of Arizona it would be permissible and appropriate to use the actual cross-examination,” but he does not accompany that assertion with any explanatory reasoning.

At the close of his letter, Walker invokes the same general pro-broadcast rationale that the Supreme Court rejected when it overturned his broadcasting order:

The Perry case involved a public trial. As Chief Justice Berger [sic] observed some years ago, “People in an open society do not demand infallibility in their institutions, but it is difficult for them to accept what they are prohibited from observing.”

But the media and public were not “prohibited from observing” the anti-Prop 8 trial, and it’s a safe bet that Chief Justice Burger would happily have signed on to the Court majority’s ruling overturning Walker’s broadcasting order. What ought to be difficult for the American people to accept is Walker’s utterly lawless course of misconduct throughout the proceeding and continuing even into his retirement.