You cannot create the Memory Hole by court order. LA Times has a constitutional right to print anything they obtain legally. They are not directly placing anyone's lives at risk by publishing.
If anything, they could publish another article about how slipshod security practices in the court system leak sensitive information to the public, and the court system tries to censor journalists rather than investigating and fixing their own problems.
The easiest way to protect the corrupt cop's family would have been to crack down on police corruption, so that no cop could get so deeply involved with a violent criminal organization that their family would ever be at risk. If the gangs couldn't get corrupt cops to cover for them, they would find it much more difficult to murder families for retaliation and intimidation.
Judging by Mexico's example, publishing may also put the journalists and their families at risk.
This is definitely shooting the messenger. In a system where doing that is illegal.
The judge is wrong, and should be reversed. Yesterday.
Drug trade earns money; money buys guns and shooters; guns and shooters protect drug trade.
Yes, yes they are. That is the entire point.
Even "a person is shocked/scared to death by the published information" would require some physiological condition that would enable someone to drop dead from an emotional response, such as heart disease with ventricular fibrillation, or organ failure due to chronic cortisol and adrenaline poisoning.
Perhaps publication of a paradox, like "This article contains no true statements," would kill an overly-logical AI?
The crime triangle of motive, method, and opportunity is closed by the criminal--the one with mens rea, the evil motive--not by anyone who produced any element of the opportunity.
Your assertion is completely unsupportable, and indirectly hostile to freedom of speech, by attributing imagined harms to speech, when their ultimate causes lie elsewhere.
It was an order to protect his family from retribution from violent psychopaths that have in the past murdered not just informants / plea deal recipients, but their entire family in the most bloody way imaginable. I would not be surprised if the headline in a few days is about his wife and children dying in ways unfit to print. And it would be irresponsible journalism of the LA Times that made it happen.
I’m one of the most pro free speech person I know, but I’m squarely with the judge and the right to seal court proceedings here. And with a now gone age of journalism where this crap didn’t happen in the first place.