Too Close for Comfort: Former Fellow Faced Jail
Perhaps no one understands the issue of secrecy —on the part of the government and journalists—better than former Fellow Lance Williams ’87 who was sentenced to jail time for refusing to reveal a confi dential source in a story about baseball. Williams and his Hearst Corporation general counsel, Eve Burton, off ered these comments at the public policy conference:
Lance Williams and Eve Burton at the KWF public policy conference.
Lance Williams: I represent a case study in the consequences of aggressive reporting in the current era. With my partner Mark Fainaru-Wada I broke what’s called the BALCO Steroid Scandal in San Francisco, a conspiracy to corrupt sports at the elite level by distributing undetectable steroids to some of the greats of Olympic Track & Field and baseball. The reporting on this was done over a couple years. Basic, conventional reporting like I’ve been doing for almost 30 years. Calling people up, asking to interview them, asking if they’ll show us their documents. Nothing special, certainly nothing I would [have] ever thought of as illegal or would get me in trouble. We were delighted to print stories based on a grand jury investigation. We used the athletes’ admissions of the drug use. This was material the government had chosen not to prosecute but it was truthful and, oh, they were great stories.
We got to write a book in addition and others, not me, have said our reporting performed a public service. Among the people who have praised our work is President Bush when we met him in 2005. He said to me and Mark, “You’ve done a service.” So I was most surprised in May of 2006 to be subpoenaed before a grand jury investigating the leak of this grand jury information and seeking to punish whoever helped us with our stories.
We couldn’t assist the government in this way. We couldn’t betray sources. The whole arrangement in basic news reporting is you say, “Look, you help me out. I won’t give you up.” True information and you exchange confi dentiality for that but the government has pushed on and in September, despite the best efforts of Hearst Corporation and Eve, we were sentenced to up to 18 months in Federal prison for declining to testify before this grand jury.
Eve Burton: I want to add something [about] the impact of the government’s three-year, multi-million dollar eff ort to learn who leaked. Again, this is just to make sure everybody understands this... THE SUBJECT IS BASEBALL. The articles were accurate, Lance and Markdidn’t violate the law, no one was harmed, the trial was over, there was no Sixth Amendment rights of defendants. It was a classic case of a “who cares who dunnit.” [You] can’t underestimate the effect this has on families, newsrooms, companies. This has taken an extraordinary amount of resources for a case of trying to fi nd out whether there was a real law enforcement interest here in who violated a protective order. [We] refer to it as grand jury material but, just to be entirely clear, these defendants were indicted so the case isn’t a criminal trial in an open courtroom and the only thing that kept the transcripts of this testimony sealed was the government didn’t want it out. They didn’t want anyone to know they gave a pass to 25, 26 athletes.... So they asked the court to issue a protective order. Again, the material was given to the government by the government trial team, defense team, so the only thing at issue here was a protective order.
Lance Williams greets reporters after contempt charges against him were dropped.
[We’re] having...a constitutional crisis in this country and the last circuit to decide a serious reporter’s privilege issue over baseball with these facts. And I just ask you whether or not it’s worth it? I ask the government whether it’s worth it. We have tried to seek resolution short of confi dential source information and it’s virtually impossible. The government ... asked us to make the Norm Pearlstein deal...split up the companies, the reporters... My defendant against your defendant. Th ey asked me to give the information to them and [then] Lance and Mark could go on their way. I explained my soul wasn’t for sale and it wasn’t [in] the company’s DNA. But they treat this like a criminal case. Th ey talk to us as if we’re subject to 35 years in prison. [If]Lance were to go to jail, just so you appreciate the harm to journalists and why there’s a chill in the air...in the 1990s he covered a series of drug-related cases and was very instrumental in having a number of drug gangs put in jail. Those people were subject to Federal prison sentences of 35 years to life and guess what? They’re still there. So if Lance goes to jail, there’s two choices— he either goes in the witness protection program where they send him somewhere in the country and give him a new name and Barb and the kids can’t visit or he’s 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. Or, we get some judge to agree to give him house arrest. This is a journalist who covered a story that changed the face of baseball. I ask the government, I ask the public, is this how we want to spend our tax dollars? And is this what we want to affect in terms of journalism in the next ten years? ‘Cause it will take 10 years to recalibrate the law, even if we win, and import a public interest standard that Brad and others might not agree to but might apply if the law requires...is it worth it?
On February 14, 2007, lawyer Troy Ellerman identified himself as the source of the leaks for the baseball stories, eliminating the necessity of jail time for Williams and Fainaru-Wada.
