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Blogger Freed After 226 Days in Jail For Contempt
frdmfghtr writes "Over at CNN is a report that a blogger has been freed after spending 226 days in jail — a record for a journalist held in contempt. 'Wolf had been found in contempt for refusing to obey a subpoena to turn over his video from a July 2005 protest during the G-8 economic summit where anarchists were suspected of vandalizing a San Francisco police car. One city officer was struck during the rally and his skull was fractured ... California's shield law allows reporters to keep sources and unpublished material secret. But there is no federal shield law protecting reporters from federal investigations. The National Writer's Union, which represents freelance writers, said in a statement that Wolf should never have been jailed. "The abuses visited on Josh and other journalists are part of an effort by governments at all levels to control the volume, flow and content of the information that reaches the public," the union said.'"
Balancing the rights of journalists and the need for information by the legal system is extremely tricky, and to be honest, I'm not sure where the balance should lie in this case. My gut instinct is that the blogger should turn over the video, but part of me is yelling "slippery slope" inside.
The most obvious standard for turning over material would be "criminal activity only," but that isn't liberal enough -- what happens when the alleged act shouldn't be a crime to begin with? (See, for example, the PATRIOT Act and DMCA, in many cases.)
> ...pasting other people's ORIGINAL writing, you are not a journalist.
Did you bother reading the article? This guy was not just a blogger who got the latest digg.com headlines and commented on them. He had a camera and went down in the trenches to obtain original footage. Yet he is not registered as a journalist.
But the thing most people here miss -- even if he was a journalist they could still have jailed him. The law protects him from local police investigations, not from Federal investigations. He was easy prey.
On the other hand... WTF dude, a cop was almost killed and you refuse to hand over the tape?
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
I'm very disappointed by the first dozen or so Slashdot comments. We all know most people who comment don't RTFA but this case is right up the alley of most Slashdotters...
For those of us still in the world with free thinking and actually use the rights afforded to us by the Constitution, this is a worrisome trend. Since 9/11, local, state and federal officers in both uniforms and plain clothes have been monitoring protesters. In particular, they want to know who the leaders and most vocal of the bunch are. This is then followed by the creation of dossiers outlining the activities of these people who exercise their right to dissent against mainsteam political opinions. With the advent of the PATRIOT act and various other "terrorism" related laws, wiretaps, probing of bank records, etc. are used not only to intimidate but silence anything that Big Brother doesn't agree with.
The point all of you have missed is that Wolf's footage never included vandalism of the police car--which was reported by the city of San Francisco to be nothing more than a broken tail light. The assault on the officer was captured only on a photograph by another protester and was also never part of Wolf's footage. The official reason for the subpoena the video was so the panel could see if any other potential crimes were committed. This however wasn't really the case because it was suspected Mr. Wolf knew the identities of people who choose to mask their faces during the protest. Mr. Wolf refused to turn these over because nothing else was needed from those tapes other than the profiling of activists at the protest and he didn't want to be compelled on the stand to give up those identities. Mr. Wolf and his lawyers believe there is no reason to comply with a Grand Jury not called in good faith to subvert his First Amendment rights--the reason it was called was because apparently Federal funds helped to pay for the police car. He stayed in jail for 286 but eventually gave in. This is very worrisome!
Where is the Slashdot group-think now? So have all of you decided that you're now aligned with dossiers and profiling of people who exercise their Constitutional rights? Are we saying that any footage caught in a public place, even if we don't prompt the said incident, is our responsibility? I hope I'm wrong.
If any journalist can be forced to provide any information (including raw footage of demonstrations and providing sourced) to the police, they will be treated like the police, and we, the public, will get little or no information any more about these events, about these people and their motivations. This is obviously a bad thing.
If just anybody can claim to be a journalist and clam up, police and prosecution will have a lot less evidence to work with and have great problems prosecuting anyone. This is obviously a bad thing too.
The trick is to strike a balance between these public interests. That's a nuanced discussed not ideally suited to slashdot.
One thing you can say is: if this guy withstood 226 days of imprisonment and still didn't turn over the tapes, it seems pretty obvious that the court is taking extreme liberties with this guys personal freedoms, without producing results.
All the more irksome is that the guy went to jail without a real trial. For all we know the tapes, not having been physically entered into evidence, never actually existed, and the whole thing is based on hearsay and a confession.
Of course, the prevailing public mood in any case seems to be "something bad happened, so someone should go to jail". We live in interesting times.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
The GP poster needs to be modded up for actually know what s/he is talking about. From the Wiki page on :
In a televised interview on February 9, 2007, Wolf and his attorney, Martin Garbus...
Wolf stated during his portion of the interview via phone from prison that he has offered to allow the judge to review "in camera" the raw footage to determine if there's any applicable evidence within the video and the U.S. Attorney's office refused the offer based on a legal technicality. Wolf also said that the raw video doesn't offer any more applicable evidence of the arson or assault charges.
It sounds like a witch hunt and you sound just like another poster who needs a good whack with a clue stick.
So basically, if you killed someone on the block and people who saw it are either your buddies or are shit scared of you, you get to walk away free?
Well, yeah. If there's no other evidence against you, then you're home free.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Oh, and the fact that the government was willing to take over the case from California State officials, claiming that the case belonged in Federal jurisdiction because the SF police department receive a little Homeland Security money, shows just how far the government was willing to go to do an end-run around the California shield law.
So, what makes someone a Journalist, and therefore protected from potential abuses of authority in order to provide the people with the infomation they need for democracy to be something more than a stage-managed farce?
...
Who decides?
There are 3 options:
A) A journalist is someone 'licenced' as such by a government body. I'm sure everyone can see the danger in that...
B) A journalist is someone 'licenced' as such by a media coporation, such as Fox News, CNN,
C) A journalist is someone who *journals* - who records events for posterity and/or to inform the people.
I personally feel that C is the most sensible, and by far the safest for society. In any rate, FTA: "Wolf, a freelancer, sold some footage to San Francisco television stations and posted it on his Web site, but refused to turn over unpublished material." So both B and C would classify him as a Journalist.
-Chris
Look into it a bit more. That assault is not the issue. This case was pushed by a federal prosecutor who was not out to provide justice for that police officer (a California state employee, who is protected under California law). He was out to label these protestors terrorists. Which is absurd, and chilling -- something worth resisting. Almost everyone is conflating the assault with the contempt-of-court finding, but they are different.
As I said above, "A political protest that turns savage is an example of a good thing gone bad. But it is not terrorism."
$META_SIG_JOKE
When I was studying journalism - television production - our teacher told us to bulk erase our source tapes or reuse them. The idea is that it can't be subpoenaed if it doesn't exist. I'm guessing this is based on his participation in the Kent State riots... but I'm not positive.