Reuters | Fox News
A Colorado court’s subpoena for Fox News reporter Jana Winter should “be invalidated as a matter of public policy,” Joseph Ax reports Winter’s lawyer Christopher Handman argued Wednesday.
A five-judge panel in New York is hearing “whether a Manhattan judge erred when he signed off on an out-of-state subpoena requiring Winter to appear in a Colorado courtroom in the first place,” Ax writes.
Attorneys for accused Colorado theater shooter James Holmes want to compel Winter to give up the law enforcement source who told her Holmes sent a disturbing notebook to a University of Chicago psychiatrist.
A Colorado judge said in April he wouldn’t rule on their motion unless the notebook was admitted into evidence.
If the subpoena stands, Handman told the court, “out-of-state subpoenas could effectively sidestep New York’s shield law whenever a New York journalist reports on news outside the state.”
Daniel Arshack, a New York lawyer representing Holmes, countered that New York’s shield law was irrelevant. The real question before the appellate judges, he said, is whether Colorado can require Winter to come to court. If she then refuses an order to testify, it would be up to the Holmes trial judge to decide how to proceed.
