For all my criticism of the juvenile tone of FITSNews, I also give credit where credit is due.
Although “credit” may be the wrong word this time. Whether this is praiseworthy or reckless depends on your perspective.
FITSNews has posted the audio of telephone calls that Republican Dorchester County Senator Randy Scott made from the Dorchester County jail following his DUI arrest. I hadn’t written about or really paid much attention to the arrest previously, because, well another state legislator with personal failings didn’t seem like news to me.
The essential facts are these:
On April 19 Scott was pulled over in Dorchester County around 11:30 pm. He allegedly failed a field sobriety test and was arrested. He was taken to the Dorchester County jail. There he made phone calls to family members. Around 7:00 am the next morning, he was released on a personal recognizance bond.
He has since claimed that the arrest was politically motivated, that the Sheriff of Dorchester County has it in for him, and that his failure of the sobriety test can be attributed to a prosthetic leg.
Somehow the Charleston News and Courier received copies of telephone calls made by Scott shortly after his arrest. His criminal defense attorney obtained a court order that restrained the publication by the paper of the tapes. Judge James Williams’ basis for the ruling on May 2 was that the tapes might affect Scott’s right to a fair trial. He made the ruling “after a conference call with Scott’s attorneys and wife,” as well as the attorney for the paper. (His wife?)
Another hearing will take place tomorrow in Greenwood to address whether the injunction should continue.
Enter FITSNews and SCHotline which both published the audio on Saturday. (I’ll let them duke it out of their “exclusive” and “first” claims. See previous juvenile reference.)
Anyway, this one’s now interesting to me.
There are all sorts of issues bouncing around here for anyone who may want to try to sort them out. Like:
1. Where a blogger knows of a judge’s order that release of tapes would infringe a criminal Defendant’s right to a fair trial, but the blogger is not specifically named in the restraining order and is not a party to the case filed, can he be held in contempt of court for the release? (My guess: Probably not.)
2. Can a blogger in this situation be forced to reveal his sources? (My guess: Probably. There’s no applicable shield law that I’m aware of, and since the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Department was ordered not to disseminate the recordings, there would be a legitimate interest in seeing if the Sheriff’s Department had violated the Order by passing the recordings on after being ordered not to.)
3. Will the bloggers be forced to appear in Greenwood tomorrow? (My guess: I don’t know, but it would make sense, if they can be served in time.)
4. If they do not appear in court tomorrow, will the temporary restraining order be dissolved? (My guess: Yes. It’s out there now.)
5. Was the Judge’s prior restraint ruling against the News and Courier correct? (My opinion: No, not even a close call.)
6. Do the tapes raise the curtain once again on the business-as-usual presumption of favoritism in the courts of this State by those in power? (My opinion: Yep. The content of the recordings is interesting on this point. And this is actually the “newsworthy” part of this story.)
Keep this up, and FITSNews won’t even have to drop celebrity posts into his blog like a teenybopper to keep the hits coming. I, for one, will be tuned in.
UPDATE: Gervais Bridges weighs in here, sneering at the FITSNews claim that it is protecting the Constitution, as opposed to enjoying its protection. Since I have managed to acquire a tone filter for FITSNews in order to make it readable, and since I still have a hard time taking anything they write seriously, I hadn’t really focused on that bit of sanctimony. But Gervais certainly has a point. It’s not what FITSNews has written that’s interesting. It’s what he’s done.