Reporter Faces Jail Time Over Source for James Holmes Notebook

FoxNews.com reporter Jana Winter is
being pressed by James Holmes’ defense attorneys to reveal her
source for information about a notebook Holmes sent to his
psychiatrist before the Aurora theater shooting. Defense attorneys
contend her source must have violated a gag order by the judge. In
a hearing in December, 14 law enforcement officials were questioned
about the notebook, but none admitted to being the source. The
judge wants
one more detective questioned before compelling the reporter to
take the stand. Winter could face up to six months in jail if she
doesn’t identify her source in that case; she’s
indicated through her attorney that she doesn’t intend to
reveal her source in court.

Winter is theoretically protected from being forced to reveal
her source by shield laws that exist in both New York and Colorado,
as well as a plain reading of the First Amendment, as Judge Andrew
Napolitano, Fox News’ senior judicial analyst and a Reason
contributor,
noted yesterday:

The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to
stimulate and protect open, wide, robust debate about the policies
and personnel of the government. Truth is essential to that
stimulation. Putting reporters in jail for revealing the truth
while protecting their sources is profoundly contrary to that
purpose and highly offensive to the values the First Amendment was
written to protect and we have all come to enjoy.

A New York judge signed off on the Colorado judge’s subpoena of
Winter, who showed up in court Monday but did not yet have to
testify. Her attorneys are looking to avoid her returning to
Colorado all together, or at least until a court in New York has
reviewed their appeal. As I noted about this case
last month, New York’s shield law is more robust than
Colorado’s, which allows a journalist to be compelled to reveal her
sources if all other avenues of uncovering the information have
been exhausted. The information sought also has to be substantially
relevant to the case, which Winter’s attorneys argue it is not.
Journalists, of course, need to be able to protect their sources’
confidentiality across the board in order to be able to secure
confidential sources for any stories, it’s a necessary foundation
of free press. When the government takes for itself the power to
compel a journalist to break the confidentiality of their sources
or newsgathering methods, it erodes that foundation.