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The Lawyer Did It

February 15, 2007

What a month it's been for journalists.

We've had a procession of superstar reporters (including five Pulitzer Prize winners) take the stand in the Scooter Libby trial. If we've learned anything, it's that the news-gathering business is often the opposite of its sharp-elbowed image. Rather than kicking ass and taking names, reporters revealed that, much of the time, what they're really doing is kissing ass and concealing names.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, two guys who upheld the finest traditions of investigative reporting -- and I say that without sarcasm or irony -- can finally sleep a little easier tonight, knowing they won't be going to jail.

Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle exposed the steroid use of a number of prominent athletes, including Barry Bonds, in articles and in the book Game of Shadows. But, because their reporting was based in large part on grand-jury testimony, they faced jail time if they didn't give up their source for the transcripts.

Yesterday their source finally let them off the hook:

A lawyer admitted in court documents Wednesday that he provided a Chronicle reporter with transcripts of confidential grand jury testimony by Barry Bonds and other athletes about steroid use, and federal authorities said they would drop their effort to send the reporter and a colleague to prison for 18 months for refusing to disclose their source.

The lawyer, Troy Ellerman, 44, who once represented the founder and another executive of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, agreed in court documents to plead guilty to four charges of disclosing the transcripts in violation of a judge's order. The plea agreement calls for a sentence of up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

No surprise that it was a lawyer who did it, and if I'd been following the case more closely I probably could've guessed that it was this particular lawyer. Still, it's easy to see why the guy let the reporters sweat for so long -- two years in jail and a quarter-million-dollar fine is a stiff price to pay for breaking a law that ultimately provided a public service.

And, while it's good news that the reporters now know they aren't going to be bunking with real criminals anytime soon, there's still a chilling message being sent by this case:

While the reporters deserve applause for not revealing their source, "someone who may be thinking about leaking information to the press may think twice if he knows he's going to go to jail,'' said Mark Feldstein, a journalism historian and associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. That could keep important information from coming to light, he said.

There is actually one journalist who remains behind bars for not revealing sources:

In San Francisco, blogger Josh Wolf has spent nearly six months in prison -- the longest incarceration of a journalist in U.S. history -- for refusing to surrender a videotape of a July 2005 anarchist protest to federal authorities.

There may have been a breakthrough this week in Wolf's case, with the government suddenly interested in reaching some kind of solution. But the entire case is beyond strange:

Wolf has been in prison nearly six months for refusing a federal grand jury subpoena to turn over raw video he shot of an anarchist protest against corporate globalization held in San Francisco's Mission District in July 2005, though government lawyers had already obtained Wolf's edited video that he sold to a local independent television station that aired it on the day of the protest.

The journalist broke no laws. He videotaped a public protest. He sold parts of the video to a TV station.

Here's why the feds have been holding him:

The case was brought against Wolf in federal court on the claim that demonstrators at the protest attempted to burn a police car, a federal crime according to government lawyers because the San Francisco Police Department receives funds from Homeland Security. Wolf and his lawyers accused the government of manipulating the case to side-step California's shield law, which allows journalists to withhold unpublished material and confidential sources from prosecutors. There is no federal shield law to afford the same protection in federal court.

Wolf elaborates in this interview. The gist is that the feds are trying to determine if a crime was committed at the anti-globalization protest Wolf was covering. Here's how Wolf describes it:

At some point in time ... a lone squad car that was just patrolling the neighborhood proceeded to accelerate into the crowd. This is what set off the issues that have since become so explosive, because shortly after the car rammed into the crowd, [the two policemen in the car] took off and tackled two individuals.

I happened to be witnessing and filming one, who was being choked, and you could see it on my videotape. The other individual, the other cop that took off, I don't really know what happened, because I was following the one. The cop that I wasn't filming was apparently struck in the head during some sort of an altercation, and at some point, allegedly by the U.S. Attorney, someone threw some sort of a firework four days after the Fourth of July in the vicinity of the cop car, although when I walked past the cop car I certainly didn't see any flames protruding, and the damage report shows that there wasn't really any damage to the cop car beyond a broken tail light.

If you watch 24, the federal agents are doing "whatever it takes" to chase down bad guys who're on the verge of doing horrible things like detonating nuclear warheads in U.S. cities. The reality is that the feds are holding a blogger in jail for six months because of a broken tail light on a police car.

Posted by LouSchuler at February 15, 2007 07:00 AM

The Lawyer Did It

February 15, 2007

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