Transcript details officer’s closed bond hearing
Public, media were wrongly barred from courtroom in 2021
NEWPORT NEWS — After a judge barred the public and news media from an April 2021 bond hearing for a Newport News police officer charged with murder, the question quickly arose:
What happened at the secret proceeding?
Now we know.
■ The Daily Press and Virginian-Pilot challenged the courtroom closure on First Amendment grounds. The Virginia Supreme Court sided with the newspapers last year, ruling the hearing should have been open — and ordering its transcript to be unsealed.
The discussion at the hearing, the transcript shows, centered on two events that prosecutors found in Sgt. Albin Trevor Pearson’s personnel record.
A 2012 case in which the officer was reprimanded for driving in his unmarked police car after drinking. He wasn’t working at the time, and whether he was on call was in dispute.
■ A 2015 case in which Pearson was accused of pulling his police handgun on restaurant patrons he was feuding with, again while off-duty.
The newspapers obtained the recently unsealed 31-page transcript, which provides details about the incidents logged in Pearson’s personnel record — and arguments attorneys made about how they should factor into a bond determination.
At the time of the bond hearing, Pearson was being charged with second-degree murder in the December 2019 shooting of 43-year-old Henry “Hank” K. Berry III.
Pearson, a 12-year veteran of the department, shot Berry during a struggle over a Taser after four officers chased him into his Oyster Point apartment without a warrant. They were trying
to arrest him on a misdemeanor charge of abusing the city’s 911 system.
The 36-year-old officer was convicted in September of voluntary manslaughter and illegal entry, and was sentenced to six years in prison.
But in April 2021 — as Pearson was out on bond — the prosecutor on the murder case contended the incidents newly disclosed in the officer’s personnel file warranted him being taken into custody pending trial.
“These circumstances make this defendant a much more real danger to the community than you previously knew,” Senior Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Brandon Wrobleski, a Suffolk prosecutor handling the case, told the judge. “These incidents should give the Court a real concern.”
But defense attorney Timothy Clancy said nothing in Pearson’s personnel files warranted revoking his bond — or even changing it.
“What we have here is a bunch of nothing,” Clancy told the judge.
In the end, Circuit Court Judge Margaret Spencer allowed Pearson to remain free pending trial, though she ordered him to refrain from alcohol and to undergo weekly and random alcohol screening.
Wrobleski made the initial request that the bond hearing be closed to the public, citing the officer’s right to a fair trial and contending pre-trial publicity could make it difficult to find impartial jurors during a pandemic.
Clancy joined in the request to close the courtroom, though he said he “candidly” did not have any case law to back a secret hearing. Spencer closed the courtroom over the newspapers’ objection.
In October, about a month after Pearson’s manslaughter conviction, the seven-member Virginia Supreme Court sided with the newspapers — saying Spencer was wrong to close the hearing. In addition to ordering the release of the transcript, the court also ordered Spencer to determine whether 450 pages of other documents also should be unsealed.