Two US reporters have avoided going to jail after their source revealed himself in a criminal plea agreement. The two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, faced up to 18 months in prison for refusing to name the source who provided them with secret grand jury testimony about alleged steroid use by professional athletes.
On February 14, defence attorney Troy Ellerman admitted he had provided the San Francisco Chronicle journalists with the secret grand jury testimony of baseball sluggers and other professional athletes. At the time of the leak, Ellerman had been representing executives of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative known as BALCO, a California firm that allegedly provided illegal performance enhancing drugs to the athletes.
US District Judge Jeffrey White, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), had ordered the two journalists to jail on September 21, although he stayed the sentence pending the outcome of their appeal. The case was under consideration in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals when Ellerman came forward to admit that he was the source.
The 9th Circuit Court had also recently ruled against freelance journalist Josh Wolf, who refused to hand over a videotape in a separate, criminal investigation.
Lance Williams, told Editor & Publisher later that the newspaper had played no part in the admission, and declined to even confirm that the lawyer was the source. "We maintained confidentiality on the source all the way through and we are still doing that, we are just not discussing it," said Williams. "What people do is what people do and we have not been released from our promise."
Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said the conclusion did not resolve the root of the problem since the source had effectively turned himself in and pleaded guilty. “If the lawyer Troy Ellerman had not admitted to giving information to Williams and Fainaru-Wada, the prison sentence imposed in the lower court for “contempt of court” would likely have been upheld on appeal on March 7,” it said. “This is a happy outcome for the journalists but is in no way a victory for press freedom and protection of sources”.
“We welcome this news since Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada are respected journalists,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said. “We remain alarmed about the jailing of Wolf.”
Wolf, a 24-year-old video blogger, has so far spent 178 days in jail. Last week, he became the longest-jailed US journalist for contempt of court. The record for a US journalist spending the most time in jail had been held by freelance author Vanessa Leggett, who spent 168 days in a Texas federal penitentiary for refusing to comply with a subpoena in a 2001 criminal case.
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, on January 19 had pleaded the case of the two journalists in a letter to the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, repeating her support for a federal law guaranteeing journalists the right to protect their sources. RSF said Nancy Pelosi’s action in taking up the case of the two journalists with the Department of Justice and voicing support for a federal “shield law” allowing protection of sources meant that the case had in one respect marked a major step forward, in the direction sought by the organisation.
