LDF committee joins prison access case
SPJ has joined at the request of the Reporters Committee For The Freedom of the Press a case called Hammer v Ashcroft. David Paul Hammer is a death-row inmate in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. who says his First Amendment rights were violated when he was denied the opportunity to conduct an interview.
SPJ lawyer Laurie Babinski has this explanation:
RCFP argues that the in-person interview ban has been implemented for impermissible reasons -- the Bureau of Prisons enacted the policy after Ed Bradley's interview with Tim McVeigh on 60 Minutes, which sparked outrage from various high-ranking government officials, including then Attorney General John Ashcroft, who criticized the media for giving McVeigh "a platform." The BOP's stance now, however, is that the restrictions had nothing to do with criticism it received about the McVeigh interview and that they were put in place for "security reasons."
In the brief, the Reporters Committee asks the 7th Circuit to reject the BOP's justifications and allow face-to-face interviews of death row inmates. In a peripheral issue, the brief also argues that another BOP restriction that bans inmates from discussing certain issues related to their fellow inmates no matter what method of communication they use (phone, letter, etc.) similarly violates the inmates’ First Amendment rights. Thus, the brief asks the court to find that the BOP media policy for inmates represents a broad restriction on both the quality and quantity of information the media can obtain from death row inmates.