By: E&P Staff In the latest example of an attempt to force a newspaper to reveal who its online readers are, defense attorneys for a convicted murderer intend to subpoena The Bee in Fresno, Calif., and four local television stations.
Attorneys for Larissa Schuster said in court Wednesday that they want the IP, or Internet protocol, addresses of everyone who accessed the news sites of the Bee and the stations to see if any of the jurors who convicted her violated a court order not to read about the case. The lawyers indicated they may seek a mistrial.
Larissa Schuster was convicted last month of killing her estranged husband with the help of an accomplice by chloroforming him, knocking him out with a stun gun, placing him in a 55-gallon drum, and pouring hydrochloric acid on him.
In general, subpoenas for such sweeping access to information from newsrooms is prohibited by the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Dalglish was commenting not on the Schuster case, but two separate episodes late last year when prosecutors demanded the names of all online readers of the alternative New Times weekly in Phoenix and the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World.
According to an account in the Bee by Chris Collins, the newspaper will not voluntarily turn over IP addresses.
"The idea that we'd violate readers' privacy by digging up that kind of information and disclosing it is preposterous," Betsy Lumbye, executive editor and senior vice president of the Bee, told the paper. "We would fight it tooth and nail and I'm confident we'd prevail."
The article quoted defense attorney Roger Nuttall as saying he had heard rumors that the jurors, or people close to them, had read about the case during the trial. The trial was moved to a Los Angeles County court because of the pre-trial publicity the sensational case attracted in the Fresno area.
Nuttall's office said he would be unavailable to comment for several days.
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