By: E&P Staff Top Village Voice Media executives Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin were arrested Thursday night by Maricopa County sheriff's deputies on charges of revealing grand jury information, a misdemeanor.
They were both released Friday.
The charges came after they published a story under their byline in the Thursday edition of the Phoenix New Times, in which they described a subpoena the paper reportedly received from a local grand jury.
?They did not have a warrant, but they told me that I was being arrested for unlawful disclosure of grand jury information,? Larkin told The New York Times by phone from his home early this morning, after he was released from jail. Lacey, executive editor, remained in jail until this morning. Captain Paul Chagolla, a spokesman for the sheriff did not return a call from the Times for comment.
The Arizona Republic reports today: "Grand jury proceedings are secret, and the two wondered in the opening paragraphs of the article whether they could face legal repercussions for making the subpoena public, but they viewed the subpoena as an attack on freedom of the press.
"The alternative weekly newspaper, in its cover story, said the subpoena was part of an investigation orchestrated to get back at its reporters and the critical stories they wrote of County Attorney Andrew Thomas' political ally Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
"The scope of the subpoena is unusually broad: It not only demands information from the reporters but also information about all the online readers of the publication since Jan. .1, 2004, including their Internet domain names and browsers and what other Web sites they visited before reading New Times."
New Times editor Rick Barrs said today, according to the Republic, that the arrests had been an attack by Thomas' attorney. "They're trying to muzzle us," Barrs said. "This is retaliation against us. And it's not just retaliation against us, it's retaliation against the press."
"I think that what has gone on here legally is without precedent," Lacey told the Republic earlier in the day, before the arrests.
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