Journalist Jana Winter was subpoeaned by defense lawyers for James Holmes, the defendant charged with the mass murder of movie theatregoers in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012, about who her law enforcement sources were for a story "which said Holmes sent a notebook to his psychiatrist that indicated he had plans for the shootings," the New York Law Journal reported this week. The New York Court of Appeal heard arguments on whether the New York shield law should apply to Winter when she was subpoeaned in a Colorado criminal court case.
Winter's attorneys argued that New York's shield law protecting reporters from disclosing their confidential sources applies to New York-based reporters covering affairs outside of the state. Attorney Christopher Handman argued, according to the NY Law Journal, that "'the idea that New York, prideful as it was about being the center of the dissemination and the gathering of news throughout the world, would limit its protections to reporters talking to sources in New York about parochial New York affairs flies in the face of the way the Legislature broadly defined news to be worldwide events.'"
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
