Subpoenas

A federal judge in Virginia heard arguments this morning about whether a New York Times reporter’s testimony is necessary for the U.S. government’s criminal leak case against former CIA employee Jeffrey Sterling.

It is more likely that a New York Times investigative reporter will have to testify in a trial against a former CIA official accused of leaking classified information, even though his subpoena before a grand jury for much of the same information was quashed, the federal judge handling the case said in a November ruling made public on Tuesday.

New York Times investigative reporter James Risen officially asked a federal judge yesterday to quash a government-issued subpoena for his testimony about a confidential source in the criminal trial of a former CIA official accused of leaking classified information.

Publishers of an alternative Arizona newspaper can continue their civil rights lawsuit against a special prosecutor who they say violated their constitutional rights by arresting the pair for publicizing purported grand jury subpoenas, a federal appellate court ruled last week.

Academics archiving the oral histories of the decades-long Troubles in Northern Ireland should be protected from subpoenas in ways similar to the protection given to journalists, attorneys for Boston College argued this week.

A federal judge in Colorado is considering a case that could affect the developing law concerning rights of anonymous Internet posters.

The U.S. Department of Justice issued a subpoena yesterday for the testimony of a New York Times reporter in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA operations officer accused of leaking classified information, highlighting a trend of government attempts to use journalists’ testimony in cases against government employees who reveal government information in exchange for anonymity.

A West Virginia trial judge erred when she ordered a newspaper to reveal the identities of anonymous sources and documents in a defamation suit against the paper, the state’s highest court recently ruled.

The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia returned the case to the lower court, which must identify and analyze each allegedly defamatory statement and the confidential source who made the statement separately.