Safeguard for Press Integrity

After two lower court rulings that went the other way, the California Supreme Court’s decision Monday that prosecutors may not compel reporters to turn over notes or other unpublished material in a criminal case is particularly welcome. That the high court’s decision was unanimous should send a strong, clear signal to prosecutors about the importance of the state’s press shield law.

Monday’s ruling stemmed from a taped 1996 interview by a Sacramento television station with a California Youth Authority inmate who confessed on camera to murdering his cellmate. The station, KOVR-TV, aired parts of the interview, including the confession. Portions not aired reportedly included an admission by the inmate that he had consensual sex with the victim before the murder and had mutilated the body afterward.

San Joaquin County prosecutors demanded to see the unaired footage, and a Superior Court judge in Stockton, agreeing that it might help the prosecutor’s case that the conviction should carry the death penalty, ordered the station to turn over the tape. When KOVR’s news director refused, the judge held her in contempt and ordered that she be jailed until she complied. That sentence was stayed pending appeal of the case.

Prosecutors argued that Proposition 115, a 1990 voter-passed crime victims initiative, established a new constitutional right for authorities to demand reporters’ notes or unaired footage in some situations. But the state Supreme Court agreed with defense attorneys that the initiative did not repeal California’s 1980 press shield law, which gives journalists absolute immunity from contempt for refusing to furnish unpublished or unbroadcast information.

“The threat to the autonomy of the press is posed as much by a criminal prosecutor as by other litigants,” wrote Justice Stanley Mosk. He and his colleagues are right. To have found otherwise would have turned reporters into unwilling government agents and compromised the integrity of the press.