Bruce Sanford, one of the nation’s best-known First Amendment lawyers, has joined the legal team appealing the $7 million libel verdict for Robert Thomas, chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Sanford is a partner at Baker Hostetler in Washington, D.C., and the author of the 1999 book Don’t Shoot the Messenger: How Our Growing Hatred of the Media Threatens Free Speech for All of Us.
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Page’s columns accused Thomas of playing politics in a 2003 disciplinary case before the Illinois Supreme Court that involved Meg Gorecki, at the time the Kane County state’s attorney. Page wrote that Thomas got the court to go easy on Gorecki, and in return her political supporters endorsed a judicial candidate Thomas favored. But Page couldn’t produce any sources. Joseph Power, Thomas’s attorney, says that’s because he never had any. Page says he relied on tried-and-true sources who want to stay hidden, and he couldn’t change their minds.
In the pretrial maneuvering the defense focused on motions that underscored the case’s weirdness. At one point it was asking the state supreme court to overrule the state appellate court on a question of judicial privilege–and asking the supreme court to disqualify itself because it couldn’t possibly rule disinterestedly on its own privilege.
The U.S. Supreme Court just did the ungrateful press another favor. It refused to review an appellate decision giving U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald the right to examine the New York Times’s phone records.
Here’s what the Times could have said instead:
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