Judge Declines to Launch Inquiry Into Times Leak
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A federal magistrate-judge will not launch an inquiry into how a New York Times reporter got police intelligence documents describing surveillance of political organizations before the Republican National Convention here in 2004. The documents were under a court confidentiality order.
City lawyers have suggested the leak came from civil rights attorneys who received the documents as part of their lawsuits against the city on behalf of protesters arrested during the convention. But the magistrate-judge, James Francis IV, said the city had not proven that the leak could not have come from city or police officials.
Some of the police documents described in the March 25 Times story were never handed over to the plaintiffs for the litigation, Judge Francis wrote in a decision yesterday. Until the city could prove the leak did not come from city or police officials, Judge Francis said he would not ask plaintiff attorneys to give affidavits stating they did not violate the confidentiality order. Judge Francis has since made the documents public.
