Court Threatens First Amendment Rights of Tennessee Newspaper for Releasing Parts of Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto

Court Threatens First Amendment Rights of Tennessee Newspaper for Releasing Parts of Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto

The ongoing battle over this manifesto is positively baffling. Why won’t they just release the whole thing?

Real Clear Policy reports:

Court Threatens First Amendment Rights of Tennessee Star After Release of Covenant School Shooting Documents

The editor-in-chief and publisher of The Tennessee Star was ordered to appear in court last week and threatened with charges of contempt after his newspaper reported on an anonymously leaked collection of documents authored by Nashville mass shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale. Michael Patrick Leahy was joined by his attorneys in court on Monday for a “show-cause hearing,” where the journalist was asked by Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles to demonstrate why his outlet’s reporting does not subject him to contempt proceedings and sanctions.

On March 27, 2023, Hale (born Audrey Elizabeth Hale) entered the Covenant School armed with three semiautomatic guns and murdered six people, including three 9-year-old children. Hale, who was eventually shot and killed by police in the school, was a transgender man and former student at Covenant who harbored extremist sentiments on race, gender, and politics. The massacre remains the deadliest mass shooting in Tennessee history.

Adam Goldstein, a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told RealClear last week that there is no legal basis whatsoever on which Myles can pursue contempt proceedings against Leahy. “It has not been alleged by anyone to date that the Star or Leahy did anything unlawful to obtain this information,” Goldstein said, speaking of the leaked documents, “or that the information was not basically accurate as published.” Reporting on leaked documents, however they were obtained by a source, is an essential journalistic practice protected by U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

A legal battle over Hale’s so-called manifesto kicked off soon after her identity was confirmed on the day of the shooting. Unlike other recent mass shootings, the perpetrator’s writings were not published online beforehand. Investigators with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department and the FBI have refused to release Hale’s writings and other documents related to the investigation, stating in an internal memo their desire to protect “legacy tokens,” or articulations of the perpetrator’s motivations, from inspiring copycats. Leahy and Star News Digital Media are plaintiffs in two ongoing lawsuits that seek to compel MNPD and the FBI, respectively, to release the documents. Chancellor Myles presides over the MNPD suit.

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