The Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction): It’s not often that we can say with certainty that a district judge has erred in issuing a ruling.

But it’s not every day that a judge has the temerity to muzzle a newspaper by contradicting centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence.

That’s what happened this week in Boulder, when Chief District Judge Maria Berkenkotter issued a ruling prohibiting the Boulder Daily Camera from publishing information contained in an arrest-warrant affidavit.

As the Daily Camera reported, “Berkenkotter made the ruling during a hearing at which prosecutors formally filed charges against 16-year-old Jeffrey Collins,” who is accused of severely beating a woman in an attempted-murder case.

The prior restraint ruling set off a chain of events that is keeping the paper from publishing the details of the arrest warrant, even though the judge agreed that her ruling didn’t meet the constitutional threshold for prior restraint.

Lawyers for the newspaper argued that prior restraints are presumptively unconstitutional. In their motion to vacate the judge’s order, they cited federal and state case law addressing every mitigating factor the judge may have considered in making an exception to the paper’s First Amendment right to publish “lawfully-acquired, truthful information about a matter of public concern.”

The Supreme Court has set a high bar for enjoining publication of news information. “Even where questions of urgent national security or competing constitutional interests are concerned, we have imposed this ‘most extraordinary remed[y]’ only where the evil that would result from the reportage is both great and certain and cannot be militated by less intrusive measures,” the motion quotes court language established by Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart.

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