[Paul is the First Amendment Ombudsman at the Freedom Forum. --DBM] ********* From: Paul McMasters <Pmcmastersat_private> To: "'declanat_private'" <declanat_private> Subject: RE: Prosecutors, judges keep Vanessa Leggett in jail for 37 days Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 16:03:44 -0400 Declan, Here's an excerpt from the column on the Leggett case I posted last week: From the northernmost reaches of Canada to the tip of Chile, only three people in the Western Hemisphere languish in prison for doing the work of a journalist. Two of them are in jail in Cuba and the third has begun her second month of imprisonment in the United States. This rather embarrassing piece of news comes to us from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which monitors despots and dictators around the world who abuse, harass and jail journalists considered inconvenient to official policies. Our sense of ourselves is that our government shouldn't be a candidate for membership in that kind of club. But there we are. Vanessa Leggett, a 33-year-old writer and university lecturer in Houston, was sent to jail on July 20 by a federal judge. The charge was contempt of court. The offense was refusing to turn over four years' worth of interview material to a federal grand jury investigating possible charges against a millionaire bookmaker implicated in the murder of his wife. Those bare facts allow us to breathe a bit easier. After all, a journalist shouldn't be above the law and law enforcement officials must have a great deal of latitude to investigate and prosecute crimes fully. But the details beyond those facts provoke a number of issues that test government officials' sensitivity to First Amendment rights and values. Among the critical questions that arise from the details: What is the definition of a journalist and who gets to fashion and enforce that definition? To what extent can journalists thus defined be compelled to serve as an arm of the law? When does aggressive prosecution of criminal suspects turn into harassment or vendettas against journalists? More important, when press freedom and law enforcement priorities collide, which better serves democratic principles and interests: subjecting the First Amendment rights of the press to criminal sanctions, or compelling the government to exhaust its own formidable investigative resources before jailing an innocent civilian independently recording the process for the public? The rest of the column is at http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=14670 Paul McMasters ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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