A reporter for a cable-access show in Chicago was ordered by a federal magistrate judge last week to hand over every video recording he made documenting anti-war protests from 2003 to 2005.
The reporter, Martin Conlisk, was subpoenaed by the city of Chicago during the course of its defense of a civil rights lawsuit filed by a local man who was arrested during a March 2005 anti-war protest. The protester, Andy Thayer, sued the city in 2007, alleging that his constitutional rights were violated by the arrest and claiming that the city’s policy of sending cops in riot gear to protests was a means to suppress speech.
Conlisk had been on the street corner filming the day Thayer was arrested and had testified in the man’s disorderly conduct criminal trial.
But in the lawsuit, the city’s subpoena requested much more than the video from the day of Thayer’s arrest. It ordered Conlisk to hand over all tapes and material that documented the planning and implementation of all anti-war protests in the city from March 2003 to the present, including everything on his computer hard drive. It also ordered him to testify about those videos.
In the April 30 ruling, the magistrate judge, Arlander Keys, refused to apply a reporter’s privilege, holding that courts in the Seventh Circuit have “rejected the notion of a federal reporter’s privilege.”
