An e-mail sent out by the First Amendment Project
California, like many states, has a law that prevents search warrants being issued against journalists. These laws were mostly passed in the wake of a 1978 Supreme Court opinion in which the Court found that the First Amendment does not prevent a search warrant from being executed against a journalist, states were free to grant journalists such right by statute. The federal government passed its own version of the law as well, the Privacy Protection Act of 1980.
Why offer journalists this protection? The answer is simple: Journalists cannot do their job of informing the public if those who they are covering believe that the journalist is gathering information that will be readily available to law enforcement.
In December of 2009, David Morse, a respected and veteran independent photojournalist was arrested while covering the student protests at the Chancellor’s House on the UC Berkeley campus. The details of his arrest are a story in its own — perhaps we’ll cover that in a future email update — but what is most important now is that as he was being detained and ultimately arrested, he identified himself as a journalist to the UC police officers no less than 6 times, repeatedly offered to show his press credentials and did after several hours get a commanding officer to look at his press credential. Nevertheless, Morse was arrested and his camera was seized as evidence pursuant to his arrest.
The charges against Morse were ultimately dropped. But while he was still in custody, the police obtained a search warrant that enabled them to view the photographs on his memory cards.
The search warrant affidavit — which is essentially the application for the warrant the police present to the judge — made no mention of Morse being or even claiming to be a journalist.
First Amendment Project is representing Morse. Just last Friday, we filed on Morse’s behalf a motion to quash the search warrant and have Morse’s memory cards and photographs returned to him. A hearing is scheduled for May 11.
FIRST AMENDMENT PROJECT remains the only nonprofit organization in the country dedicated to providing free legal services exclusively on free speech and free press issues. We’ve been really busy and hope to have more updates on our work out to you soon.
CA Senate committee established to study CA public record and open meeting laws
Sen. Leland Yee, who has complained about California universities not making public records accessible, will chair the committee. See Associated Press article.
How to find public records
Below is a copy of a newly added page about public records requests, under “Public Records.”
Click here to download the public record request form for the state of California.
As the attached document itself states, “under the California Public Records Law, California Government Code §6251, Oakland City Ordinance No. 12483, commonly known as the “Sunshine Ordinance” and the Constitution of the State of California as amended by the passage of Prop 59 on Nov. 3, 2004,” citizens have a right to any public document by law. Use this form to request public documents.
Please note, when describing the document or record you are requesting, it is important to be very specific. If you can, find out the exact name of the document that has the information you are looking for and state that in the description. The more specific you are, the faster the process of getting the document will go and the more likely it is that you will actually find a document with the information you want in it. The public record request form is deceptively simple, but still infinitely useful.
If you are dealing with the University of California: before using this form, try to find the information online first, and if that doesn’t work, talk to a public information officer (PIO) and ask them to help you find the form. The author’s hesitation to tell you to file a public information quest whenever the mood strikes you is due to her assumption that you and each of your many friends will be so excited about the idea of requesting public records that some poor individual in a cubicle will be flooded with so many requests s/he simply can’t process them in a reasonable amount of time. The author of this post found herself in a situation once where she and many of her peers had sent such an onslaught of information requests to the individual who handles them for UC Berkeley that he was completely overwhelmed and none of the requests went through.
The First Amendment Project is a great resource if you have further questions about how to get your eager hands on some glorious public records. The author recommends you go to their resources page.
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