Subpoenas

A federal judge in Seattle yesterday granted a journalism professor’s motion to quash a subpoena from lawyers representing Chicago police officers in a civil rights case.

Judge Marsha Pechman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington ruled in favor of Carolyn Nielsen, who wrote articles about a now-exonerated teenage murder defendant during graduate school. Pechman also awarded Nielsen a protective order against future deposition and her attorneys fees and costs.

Two government defendants in a civil rights lawsuit yesterday dropped a subpoena for unedited video footage of a reporter’s interview with the plaintiff in the case.

A federal appellate court has vacated a lower court ruling that a New York Daily News gossip columnist’s recorded interview would have to be disclosed to a litigant.

At least one judge on the appellate panel that will decide whether a documentary filmmaker must turn over 600 hours of unused footage seemed skeptical on Wednesday of the argument that a journalist's privilege protects all of the documentary outtakes.

The Court of Appeals in New York City (2nd Cir.) heard oral arguments yesterday about whether Joe Berlinger, the maker of "Crude: The Real Price of Oil," should have to give his outtakes to the Chevron Corporation, which says they're needed to fight pending legal battles.

A North Carolina judge has ordered an online-news editor to produce the names of six anonymous posters who allegedly posted defamatory comments on his website, although one of them identified himself this morning on a local AM radio station.

At least one government agency is using subpoenas to target e-mail between journalists and potential sources by going after the source.

Two self-proclaimed fraud convicts recently turned over thousands of documents  rather than fight a Securities and Exchange Commission subpoena that asked for, among other things, e-mail the men had exchanged with reporters.

Three groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs yesterday in a dispute between an oil company that wants unused documentary footage and the filmmaker who says he is not bound to provide it.

A judge has ruled that University of California police illegally obtained photographs from a journalist covering a campus protest.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Yolanda Northridge on Friday ordered police to return all copies of the photos taken during the December protest at the Berkeley campus, according to the Oakland, Calif.-based First Amendment Project. The judge also ordered university officials to declare under oath what agencies, if any, received copies of the photos.

Documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger will not have to turn over 600 hours of raw footage to Chevron for now, at least until the appellate court hears the merits of his appeal.

A New York federal judge on Thursday ruled that though a reporter's privilege applies to a documentary filmmaker, he must still hand over unused footage to Chevron in a dispute over whether the oil company polluted the Amazon rain forest.