St. Paul police stir First Amendment quarrel

The issue -- a St. Paul traffic stop -- is minor stuff to some, but a "leak" of information about the seven-year-old case to a TV reporter has prompted a police investigation and, in turn, an extraordinary step: police seizure of the reporter's cell-phone records.

Police obtained the phone records of KMSP-TV reporter Tom Lyden without him knowing it, he said, and without the news organization having the opportunity to fight the action in court.

The move has been 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.

Police spokesman Tom Walsh, citing an open investigation, declined Wednesday to discuss the phone-records seizure, other than to say that the case involved possible misconduct by a public official.

Police Chief John Harrington also would not comment, Walsh said.

Lyden said Wednesday that the issue was press freedom, in particular the protection of confidential sources: "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," he said.

Citizens should be worried for other reasons, he said -- primarily "who police target next. If they do it to me, a member of the press, they can do it to anyone."

Non-public, then public

According to Lyden, the investigation stems from his June 11 news 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 had reason to believe, he said, that the woman, who was riding with her husband, had been involved in a road-rage incident earlier in St. Paul. After getting a case number, Lyden said, he asked for a detailed narrative report about the 2000 incident. Police refused.

The information was not public, he said he was told.

He did succeed, however, in obtaining the police narrative from another source, and while Lyden didn't name names Wednesday, Fletcher said in a letter to Harrington that Walsh had told him that the source may have been a Ramsey County deputy.

Even if true, Fletcher wrote, he'd since determined that the information at issue was public.

Police, in fact, did provide the document to reporters Wednesday. It describes the woman as being verbally abusive to a police officer, swearing repeatedly. She also noted that she was, at the time, a police reserve officer in St. Paul, a fact authorities confirmed Wednesday.

Initial news reports about police seizure of Lyden's cell-phone records said it was done through use of administrative subpoena, which unlike a search warrant, does not require judicial review.

But Jack Rhodes, chief of staff to the Ramsey County attorney's office, said that those reports were inaccurate, and that his office had not signed off on a request for an administrative subpoena, as is required by state law. That leaves a search warrant as the likely means, although one was not yet on file in district court.

Either way, Kirtley said, by taking their request directly to a third party, in this case a telephone company, police avoided running up against a federal law that protects newsrooms from searches, except in limited circumstances.

KMSP, as such, had no opportunity to argue its case -- as have news organizations subpoenaed by federal prosecutors.

"It would be one thing if this was a top-secret investigative document," she said. "But this was a traffic case. ... It seems like a huge reaction by someone who shouldn't have had a reaction at all."

Clint Brewer, national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, said in a news release 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."

KMSP is requesting an apology and the return of the phone records, Lyden said Wednesday night. Asked about the possibility of a lawsuit, he said: "I think we're kind of keeping our powder dry, and see what they do."

Anthony Lonetree • 651-298-1545