ABSTRACT
When flamboyant Estes v. Texas financier Billie Sol Estes was indicted for swindling in 1962, his celebrity status prompted intense media coverage of the case, including requests by local television stations to broadcast his trial. The media based their claim on the right to a free press as set forth in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. A group of Miami Beach police officers convicted of burglarizing a local restaurant relied on Estes for their argument that they had been deprived of a fair trial when local television broadcast three minutes of testimony from the prosecution's star witness. Warren E. Burger's claim that Estes mandated a case-by-case approach to televising criminal trials was, to say the least, highly implausible, and it prompted a sharp response from Justice Potter Stewart, who maintained that the convictions in Chandler could not be sustained unless Estes was overruled.
