Is that a shrub in your pocket...
or are you just a corporate profiteer?
Saturday, April 10, 2004
"People just don't revere it like they used to"
That's what Supreme Court 'Justice' Antoni' "Big Pussy" Scalia said about the US Constitution in a speech at the Presbyterian Christian High School in Hattiesburg, Miss. You can't listen to the speech, of course, because Pussy had a US Marshall rip tape recorders out of the hands of two reporters (including Antoinette Konz, suspected terrorist and school reporter for the radical left wing Hattiesburg American newspaper.
Never mind that this was a public speech given by a public figure, and never mind that reporters weren't tol before hand that they couldn't record the speech (and, what the fuck's the problem here, anyway? Is he afraid of being quoted accurately or something?). What is a US Marshall doing confiscating a reporter's (or anybody else's) tape recorder?
Not only is this sleazy and ridiculous (which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up Scalia and the positions he's taken on the bench), it's unethical and even illegal.
It's pretty much understood by 1st Amendment experts government officials — including judges — can't confiscate or destroy records that journalists obtain in public events.
According to law professor Jane Kirtley (Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota):
"This is a major embarrassment. And it is unsupportable as a matter of law. They could have said, 'No Press Allowed.' But if they let the reporters in and there are no ground rules announced in advance, they can't then say you can't report that or you can't use that."
Information, once made public, could not be declared confidential afterward.
Kirtley also says that this action violates the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which says:
It shall be unlawful for a government officer or employee … to search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast or other similar form of public communication."
It also permits a person who has been harmed by violation of the Act to sue the government or government employee who caused the harm.
What are the odds of that happening? I bet it would go all the way to the Supreme Court. You think the great white duck hunter would recuse himself from that one?
posted by pjs 10:55 AM
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