If the American public is to take Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia at his word, he’s appalled by the actions of a federal
marshal during an April 7 speech at a Mississippi high school.
If the American public is to take Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at his word, he’s appalled by the actions of a federal marshal during an April 7 speech at a Mississippi high school.
While the justice spoke that day, the marshal approached two reporters and instructed them to turn over recordings of Scalia’s speech.
“I abhor as much as any American the prospect of a law enforcement officer’s seizing a reporter’s notes or recordings,” he (Scalia) wrote in a letter to one of the reporters. “The marshals were doing what they believed to be their job, and the fault was mine in not assuring that the ground rules had been clarified. Indeed, in the future I will make clear that recording for use of the print media is no problem at all.”
That doesn’t get it done, Justice Scalia.
Broadcast media will also send reporters to cover speeches by the justice, and they deserve as much access to his speeches – up to and including videotaping them – as the print media.
Scalia’s change of heart, be it ever so slight, is laudatory, but differing standards for differing mediums violates the spirit of the very document he has been appointed to protect – the U.S. Constitution.
– Chillicothe Gazette, Ohio
