The Daily 49er’s former editor-in-chief reached an agreement June 23 with University Police. It nullified a court order that required her to release e-mail and IP addresses of users who posted comments on Daily49er.com.
On May 11, then-Editor-in-Chief Joanne Tucker was served with an order requiring her to give University Police deleted comments — along with the e-mail and IP addresses of the users that made them — from four articles on Daily49er.com. The articles were about last semester’s reported assault of a transgender student on campus and the Chicana Feminism Conference in March.
According to Tucker, Detective John Leyva served her with the order several weeks after he called her asking for the deleted comments. After consulting with the newspaper’s adviser and the Student Press Law Center, Tucker told the detective to get a court order for the information since California’s shield law protects newspapers from giving out unpublished information.
Tucker said that when she received the order, she was immediately concerned with its wording. It classified the newspaper as an “electronic communications service company,” had no docket number and contained a nondisclosure clause that prohibited Tucker from discussing its contents.
Tucker again contacted the Student Press Law Center and spoke with Adam Goldstein, an advising attorney. Goldstein said the purpose of those types of orders is to prevent terrorism and piracy. He added that they should only be used in “the most dire threats of national security,” not to “require newspapers to secretly hand over their notes.”
“The service provider subpoena that the publication got was so clearly not permissible for this purpose that it was almost difficult at first to explain what was wrong with it,” Goldstein said. “On the face of it, it asked for copies of communications, when relying on a law that specifically stated you can’t give the communications.”
Goldstein told Tucker that she could comply with the order or try to get a lawyer and fight it. Tucker said the comments would be irrelevant to a police investigation and were deleted because they were spam or contained copyrighted information from other websites.
“If there had been a threat made or someone had said ‘I did it’ or was confessing, we definitely would have contacted University Police for fear of being liable for something,” Tucker said.
Tucker decided to fight the order, and lawyer Chris K. Ridder took on her case pro bono. On June 23, an agreement voiding the order was signed by Tucker, General Counsel for Cal State Long Beach G. Andrew Jones and University Police Chief Stan Skipworth.
“My issue was setting a precedent for the newspaper because the Daily 49er has never had to deal with this type of situation,” Tucker said. “I wanted to make sure we went about this in the right and legal way to set a precedent in our relationship with University Police.”
Goldstein said the Student Press Law Center sees thousands of cases every year and he has seen about 12,000 himself.
“I’ve never seen, anywhere, ever, anyone try to use this subpoena procedure against a student newspaper,” Goldstein said. “I feel pretty secure in saying this was utterly unprecedented and hopefully it will never happen again.”
University Police Chief Skipworth declined to comment for this article.
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