No respondent reported suffering court sanctions for refusing to comply with a subpoena. Nevertheless, the year 2001 saw the longest jailing of a journalist in U.S. history.

In July 2001, unpublished author Vanessa Leggett went to jail for refusing to turn over information she had collected while working on a book about the 1997 murder of Houston socialite Doris Angleton. The subpoena came from a federal grand jury investigating the case and sought all of Leggett's tape-recorded interviews with her sources, including all copies of transcripts. Leggett argued that she was protected by a reporter's constitutional privilege against divulging confidential sources. Two federal courts disagreed. U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon ruled on July 6, 2001, that no such privilege protects journalists in Texas. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Houston (5th Cir.) ruled that no reporter's privilege exists against a grand jury subpoena.

Both the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to intervene in Leggett's case. Justice Department officials deferred to the court rulings and said Leggett, a book author, could not benefit from federal guidelines that limit the government's authority to subpoena journalists.

Sticking to her journalistic principles, Leggett chose to go to jail for contempt rather than comply with the court's order to disclose her sources. In the end, she spent 168 days in jail and was released only when the term of the grand jury before whom she was supposed to testify expired.

While Leggett's experience was unusual because of her lengthy jail stay, reporters have been sanctioned in other cases for noncompliance with subpoenas. In years past, respondents to this survey have reported on the jailing and fining of their reporters. For example, in 1997, a California television news director was sentenced to jail after refusing to turn over outtakes from a jailhouse interview with an accused killer. The California Supreme Court ruled in November 1999 that the shield law should have protected the journalist.7

In 1993, three of the responding news outlets reported that a staff member was sanctioned for refusing to comply with a subpoena. In the 1991 survey, six organizations reported that employees had been sanctioned for not responding to subpoenas. In 1989, one news outlet reported that a staff member was subject to a sanction.