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KMSP-TV first reported Tuesday night that police had obtained the cell phone records of reporter Tom Lyden without giving the station the opportunity to fight the action in court.
Leaders of the Society of Professional Journalists weighed in with a statement Wednesday night.
Clint Brewer, national president of SPJ, said in the statement that the police department’s actions were “nothing less than an attack on the First Amendment and the notion of open government. They should withdraw their subpoena, return Mr. Lyden’s phone records and apologize.”
The move was also decried by Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher as an “abuse of authority” and by Jane Kirtley, professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, as an “end run” around a state law protecting reporters from divulging their sources.
St. Paul police spokesman Tom Walsh, citing an open investigation, declined Wednesday to discuss the matter, other than to say that the case involved possible misconduct by a public official.
Police Chief John Harrington also would not comment, Walsh said.
“In essence, by getting my phone records, my personal cell-phone records, they have reached into my notes and reached into my Rolodex, and violated every confidence that my sources have placed in me,” Lyden said Wednesday.
Lyden said the investigation stems from his June 11 story involving a woman whose husband had shot a plainclothes police officer during a “road rage” incident in Coon Rapids a few days before. He said he had reason to believe that the woman, who was riding with her husband, had been involved in a road-rage incident in St. Paul seven years earlier.
St. Paul police refused his request for a detailed narrative report about the 2000 incident, telling him the information wasn’t public. But Lyden succeeded in obtaining the report from another source. While Lyden didn’t name names, Fletcher said in a letter to Harrington that Walsh had told him the source might have been a Ramsey County deputy.
Even if that was true, Fletcher wrote, the document was public.
“What’s crazy about this whole thing is that the police department wants to know which public employee actually followed the law by providing a public document that everyone is entitled to,” said David Cuillier, chairman of SPJ’s Freedom of Information Committee. “This could frighten government employees everywhere, telling them that if they don’t go along with secretive, illegal agency practices they will be hunted down through any means and perhaps punished.”
Police did release the document Wednesday. It describes the woman as being verbally abusive to a police officer, swearing repeatedly. It also said she was, at the time, a police reserve officer in St. Paul.
KMSP’s initial report said police obtained Lyden’s phone records with an administrative subpoena, which unlike a search warrant, does not require a judge’s approval. But Jack Rhodes, chief of staff in the Ramsey County attorney’s office, told the Star Tribune that was inaccurate and that the office had not signed off on a request for an administrative subpoena, as state law requires. That leaves a warrant as the likely means, although one was not yet on file in district court, the newspaper said.
Asked about the possibility of a lawsuit, Lyden said: “I think we’re kind of keeping our powder dry, and see what they do.”
