Phoenix Journalists Arrested

Scary and sobering article - my apologies if this has already been posted (couldn't find it tho) -

www.nytimes.com...

Scary anyone?

dm

Your link is to a NYT subscriber only article.

Got another source or at least a description of the content?

Here's the article - and why does nyt keep using that lame subscription feature? so lame!

The Media Equation
A Knock in the Night in Phoenix

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By DAVID CARR
Published: May 12, 2008

On Oct. 18, Jim Larkin and his wife, Molly, were in bed in their home outside Phoenix when a group of men in unmarked cars pulled up and began knocking on the door and shining flashlights in the house, saying, “You know what we want.”

Recalling the night on the phone last week, Mr. Larkin said, “I had no idea what they wanted.” Mrs. Larkin immediately called 911 and said, “Oh my God, help us, please,” begging the police to find out who was threatening them at their door.

In fact, the cops were already on the case.

The Maricopa County Selective Enforcement Unit had arrived to arrest Mr. Larkin for the crime of disclosing the inner workings of a grand jury. Michael Lacey, the executive editor of Village Voice Media, was arrested in similar fashion at his home near Phoenix.

Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey are the two principal owners of Village Voice Media, publisher of The Phoenix New Times. Earlier that day, under Mr. Lacey’s and Mr. Larkin’s bylines, the paper published an article about a subpoena it had received demanding, among other things, the Internet addresses and domain names of members of the public who had visited the newspaper’s Web site.

Reporters have ended up in handcuffs in the United States before — some have gone to jail to protect the identity of sources — but it is a rare moment when someone here is imprisoned for the crime of typing.

In the months since, The Phoenix New Times has steadily covered a story it finds itself in the middle of, but its executives recently decided to match the legal aggression from local authorities with some aggression of their own. At the end of last month, Mr. Lacey and Mr. Larkin filed a lawsuit accusing the Maricopa County sheriff, the county attorney and a special prosecutor of engaging in a pattern of negligence, conspiracy and racketeering motivated by an effort to suppress the newspaper’s right to publish and the public’s right to know.

The Phoenix New Times, the original paper of what is now a chain of 16 alternative weeklies that includes The Village Voice and LA Weekly, has been engaged in a running battle with the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, on and off since 1992. He first came to prominence as a jailer who mandated that his charges wear pink underwear, eat green bologna and live in a tent city where a neon vacancy sign he installed always glows, a reminder that there’s always room at Joe’s Inn. He is the architect of both female and juvenile chain gangs, a first by most accounts, and transferred more than 3,000 prisoners to new facilities in their underwear, a scene that was captured eagerly by television crews.

Sheriff Arpaio has been historically a darling of television news. While his willingness to create a kind of tented gulag in the desert might be the source of amusement to those who tire of stories of coddled prisoners, it should be pointed out that some of those prisoners have an alarming tendency to die while under his care. On May 3, The East Valley Tribune reported, “More than 60 Maricopa County jail inmates have died since 2004, many from illnesses that would be treatable in normal medical settings.”

More recently, he has been the self-appointed tip of the spear in the fight against illegal immigration, organizing posses that swept Hispanic neighborhoods and arresting people his officers suspected of being illegal aliens.

The Phoenix New Times and the sheriff have traded roundhouses for years, but the dustup took a serious turn in July 2004, when John Dougherty, then a reporter at the paper, wrote that Sheriff Arpaio had invested $690,000 in cash in commercial rea

real estate at a time when his salary was $72,000 along with a modest federal pension. Mr. Dougherty also reported that the sheriff had removed information from public records about his commercial holdings. (Since then, Mr. Dougherty has been freelancing, including for The New York Times.)

In the final paragraph of the article, the newspaper published Sheriff Arpaio’s home address, a violation of a little-known Arizona statute that prohibits publication of the address on the Web if it poses “an imminent and serious threat” to the sheriff or his family. (The statute came into play when the newspaper story was placed on The Phoenix New Times Web site.)

In April 2005, Sheriff Arpaio requested an investigation by the county attorney, arguing that he had been the subject of death threats in the past and that the publication of his address, which was freely available in a variety of public records, put his family at risk.

The county attorney, Andrew Thomas, appointed Dennis I. Wilenchik, a political ally and former employer, as a special prosecutor in the case in 2007. Mr. Wilenchik issued subpoenas to The Phoenix New Times in August for sources and records tied to articles about Mr. Arpaio and also sought information on any member of the public who had visited the newspaper’s Web site since 2004, presumably to see who had been mousing over his home address.

On Oct. 18, The New Times ran an article under the bylines of Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey criticizing the broad subpoenas; later that same day, the two were picked up and taken to jail. In the ensuing uproar, Mr. Wilenchik was fired and the charges against the two New Times executives were dropped.

Mr. Lacey said the suit filed by himself and Mr. Larkin against Sheriff Arpaio and the county officials was necessary because the sheriff continues to restrict access to information to The New Times and other news media.

“Suing people is not the core of what we do, but our arrest was just the culmination of an ongoing reign of terror that is still continuing,” he said. “He went after inmates, then he went after immigrants, and now it’s journalists.”

A spokesman for the sheriff initially stated that he would respond to an interview request, then a few minutes later sent an e-mail message that said “the office is unable to comment on pending litigation.” Mr. Thomas sent a statement by e-mail suggesting that, “After endangering the sheriff and admitting violating the law in their own tabloid, the editors of The New Times now have filed a frivolous lawsuit that reads like a John Grisham novel.”

Considering that journalists generally merit public sympathy on par with dogcatchers and meter maids, there had been little outcry over the sheriff’s efforts to limit access and reporting of his office’s activities, but the grab for the Web addresses of plain old citizens got plenty of people’s attention.

“I am unaware of any case in which the government has sought to know not just the identity of readers, but their surfing habits,” Mr. Lacey said.

If Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey want their pound of flesh from Sheriff Arpaio, they will have to get in line. Over $50 million in lawsuits have been filed naming the county and its sheriff as a defendant. Sheriff Arpaio and Mr. Thomas are both up for re-election this fall, and the growing liabilities could be an issue in the coming campaign.

Sheriff Arpaio told The Arizona Republic that he couldn’t care less.

“They can’t take their own medicine, so they have to be like crybabies and file a lawsuit against the sheriff and the county attorney. So you know what? I welcome the lawsuit. I welcome being sued.”

Reporters around the world work under state-imposed limits on information, and there are even places where police show up in the dead of night and spirit them away to jail for having the temerity to commit journalism. It is a grim tableau repeated too often all over the world: it happens in Iran, it happens in China, it happens in Zim

Wow... state imposed limits on information.

Doc, this is heavy!

I'm not a subscriper and I could read the original article just fine. Unnecassary paste of the entire article imo.

The NYT is like that sometimes, I guess they must move articles to non-subscription part of their site based on how much traffic an article is getting.

In any case, good article, thanks to the OP for sharing it.

So much for freedom of information...

From what I've seen they've gone after photographers for years now. I guess it's the logical next step to go after the writers.