Everything online journalists need to protect their legal rights. This free resource culls from all Reporters Committee resources and includes exclusive content on digital media law issues.
A convicted terrorist claiming that the limits on communication he faces while serving a life sentence at a federal penitentiary violate his First Amendment rights can proceed with his lawsuit against the government, the District Court in Colorado has ruled.
A statement that someone is a member of a certain prison gang, when he merely conspired with its members, is substantially true and therefore protected against a defamation suit, a Colorado federal appellate court ruled this month.
An incarcerated felon who placed a personal advertisement on a website is a limited purpose public figure who could not meet the heightened standard of proof of actual malice in his defamation claim against the Boston Herald and a Herald reporter for the paper's series on prisoners and online dating, a Massachusetts appellate court ruled earlier this week in LaChance v. Boston Herald.
The media will not be allowed to interview a prisoner slated to be executed by firing squad in Utah, The Salt Lake Tribunereports.
The Utah Department of Corrections said in a letter to the media that allowing interviews of Ronnie Lee Gardner, who was sentenced to death for fatally shooting an attorney during an attempted escape from custody, would shift the focus away from the victims of his crime.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday said it would not hear the appeal of a death row inmate who argued that a federal policy banning in-person interviews violated his constitutional rights.
Wisconsin prison officials have released video footage of a guard detonating a grenade typically used for outdoor crowd control in the cell of an individual prisoner after the Associated Press sued to obtain a copy of the footage, the news agency reported.
A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a regulation barring prisoners on death row in the federal system from meeting with reporters. In doing so, a majority of Seventh Circuit judges set a low bar for determining when an inmate's constitutional rights can be infringed upon, over the objections of several dissenting judges.
The Defense Department does not have to release the names of Guantanamo Bay detainees who reported abuse by military personnel or who were suspected of abusing others, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan (2nd Cir.) decided Monday, overturning a lower court decision.
The three-judge panel held that The Associated Press’s Freedom of Information Act request for the detainee names and family member names and addresses should not be granted because of the detainees' privacy interests.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion Friday to stop the censorship of torture and abuse allegations that have arisen during the prosecution of five high-profile Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Two Democratic lawmakers are looking to hold private prisons housing federal inmates to the same Freedom of Information Act standards as federal facilities. But while their bills sit in Congress, the First Amendment Center reports, open government advocates are coming at the issue from a different angle.
