Silent Treatment   

Changes in Illinois Supreme Court rules are causing struggles between reporters, prosecutors and police as media access to certain information is cut off.

Changes in Illinois Supreme Court rules result in struggles between reporters, prosecutors and police as media access to certain information is cut off. The rules, designed to ensure fair trials for defendants, spell out what can and can¹t be said to the public before and during a court case.
Madison County, in southwest Illinois, took it the hardest.
On March 28, reporters who showed up at police departments looking for crime reports left empty-handed. A meeting on the new rules between the county state¹s attorney, William R. Haine, and police chiefs led the departments to pull all information from public access. The media there couldn¹t run so much as a police blotter.
Edwardsville Intelligencer Editor David R. Feld says other Illinois journalists have told him about minor difficulties, but his coverage area exhibited "the most extreme reaction in the state."
Three days after the initial rebuff, police reverted to what Feld calls "a brownout." After Haine called the chiefs in again to talk it through, departments in and around Edwardsville began releasing "the bare minimum" required by law, Feld says. Gone are the background discussions of a case and talks with officers.
The state¹s attorney did not tell police to withhold all information, he says. "Somehow I thought...they would be able to give the news organizations the bare facts of an arrest sans the reports," Haine says, adding that the police weren¹t sure how to do that.
Haine's main concern is an addition to the rules that requires prosecutors to "exercise reasonable care to prevent investigators, law enforcement personnel, employees or other persons assisting or associated with the prosecutor in a criminal case" from making certain statements out of court. That responsibility put on him, Haine says, is "unsettling."
But those associated with the Supreme Court wonder why the harsh reaction to rules that they say haven't changed that much and that mirror American Bar Association guidelines on extrajudicial speech, revised in 1994. "We find the prosecutors' position to be quite puzzling," says James J. Grogan, chief counsel of the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois.
Still, a group of Illinois attorneys, including the state attorney general, weren't pleased with the model and in November petitioned the court to reconsider the changes. The Supreme Court denied the motion and put the rules into effect March 16.
Grogan outlines the four principal changes: First, the rules now apply only to lawyers involved in a case, while the old standards applied to all lawyers. Second, the court added a provision allowing lawyers to respond to adverse publicity about their clients. Third, the "reasonable care" item was added to prevent a prosecutor from getting a police officer to reveal to reporters what he or she can't, says Grogan. Fourth, the court cleaned up the language regarding lawyers' out-of-court talk. Witness identity and expected testimony weren't allowed to be revealed before, but the new rules spell that out more specifically.
The media are suffering the effects of the controversy. Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, says restricting what a criminal lawyer can say shuts down "probably the most accurate, credible source" for the media, which will continue to cover cases without that source.
She sees a "growing trend" of these rules and, more disconcerting, pre-trial gag orders.
Most of the access problems have subsided, says Beth Bennett, government affairs manager of the Illinois Press Association. She agrees that there hasn't been much change to the rules. "It was just a shaking-out period where people overreacted," Bennett says.
Last year, the IPA was successful in having the state pass its "Media Arrest Report" law, which specifies what police must release to the media after an arrest. The media are getting the basics, she says, but "heart-to-heart" talks with law enforcement personnel are not as likely.
Madison County reporters, meanwhile, are trying to make do. "About the best that any [police departments] are doing is to simply give us the log sheets," which include the time a call was received, who responded and a brief description of the incident, says Steve Whitworth, city editor at Alton's Telegraph.
In Edwardsville, the situation has strained what was once a really good relationship between journalists and city police and stalled discussions about publishing a weekly column written by officers. "Even if everything returned the way it was tomorrow," Feld says, "the relationship would've taken a significant step backward."