News photographers take pictures of Gigi Jordan in Manhattan Supreme Court during the reading of the verdict in her murder trial.
In Jordan v. Lamanna, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit considered whether the district court properly granted a writ of habeas corpus and ordered a new trial for petitioner Gigi Jordan, who was convicted of manslaughter in New York State Supreme Court in 2014. 33 F.4th 144 (2d Cir. 2022).
In a unanimous decision authored by Circuit Judge Sack, with Circuit Judges Leval and Park concurring, the Second Circuit reversed the district court’s grant of habeas corpus, finding that the trial judge’s closing of the courtroom to the public for approximately 15 minutes, during Jordan’s nine-week trial, did not violate Jordan’s right to a public trial as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. The court held that the substantive impact of the closed proceeding was negligible, and that there was no historical precedent suggesting that the closed portion of the hearing should have been held in public. The panel concluded that Supreme Court precedent specifying the steps to be taken before closing a criminal trial to the public—in particular Waller v. Georgia, 467 U.S. 39, 44 (1984) and Presley v. Georgia, 558 U.S. 209, 212 (2010) (per curiam)—did not necessarily apply to ancillary proceedings such as the 15-minute “closed proceeding” in Jordan. Thus, the Second Circuit held that the New York State Appellate Division’s opinion upholding Jordan’s conviction was not an unreasonable application of the law.
Jordan’s Trial and the ‘Closed Proceeding’
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