For the past five years, Vanessa Leggett has been working on a non-fiction book about the killing of Houston socialite Doris Angleton, who was found shot to death in April 1997. Mrs. Angleton's millionaire husband, Robert, was accused of paying his brother, Roger, to kill his wife. Both brothers were charged with capital murder.

In the course of her research, Leggett conducted a series of interviews with Roger Angleton in prison in 1998. Roger Angleton subsequently committed suicide, leaving a note claiming full responsibility for the murder. While the case was still in front of the Texas grand jury, state prosecutors subpoenaed Leggett's taped interviews with Roger Angleton. Because she had not promised confidentiality to Roger Angleton and because his suicide precluded prosecutors from questioning him directly, Leggett complied with the subpoena and handed over her interviews to the grand jury. Robert Angleton was subsequently acquitted in state court.

Following that acquittal, the federal government began an investigation into Angleton's activities. In November 2000, the FBI contacted Leggett about becoming an informant for the Bureau. She declined, citing a possible loss of her integrity and objectivity as a reporter, and expressed a concern over the loss of confidentiality with her sources. Leggett was then subpoenaed to testify in front of the grand jury, and she agreed to do so after the FBI assured her she would not have to reveal the sources of her information.

However, in June 2001 a federal grand jury subpoenaed all of Leggett's tape-recorded conversations with anyone she had interviewed about Robert Angleton's prosecution. She refused, arguing that a reporter's privilege protected her from being forced to disclose confidential sources. On July 6, U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon ruled that the Fifth Circuit "does not recognize such a privilege as protecting a journalist from divulging confidential or nonconfidential information in a criminal case." Leggett was found in contempt and on July 20 was ordered imprisoned without bail for 18 months or until termination of the grand jury.

In August, while avoiding the question of whether Leggett is a journalist entitled to a reporter's privilege, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the ruling that no reporter's privilege exists against a grand jury subpoena. In November, the same court declined to reconsider the case or release her on bond until she had exhausted her appeals. Leggett still refused to turn over her materials, choosing instead to remain in prison in order to permit her attorneys to press for a review of her case and a clarification of the law surrounding a journalist's First Amendment privilege to protect confidential sources. On January 2, 2002, attorney Michael DeGeurin filed an appeal on her behalf to the U.S. Supreme Court, stating "I'm requesting that the government protect journalists from being used as an investigative arm of the government." Two days later, Leggett was released after the federal grand jury completed its term. Her Supreme Court case is pending, though her release makes it less likely the case will be heard.

Leggett's ordeal has raised several important legal issues, including:

• whether the government has a right to define who is and who is not a journalist;
  
• to what extent journalists are entitled to protect confidential sources in stories relating to criminal proceedings;
  
• differences among state Shield Laws protecting journalists (which many states have but Texas does not) and the lack of Shield protection under federal law; and
  
• variations in interpretation of Shield protections in U.S. Circuit Courts.
  

In the 1972 case Branzburg v. Hayes, a sharply-divided U.S. Supreme Court refused to create a First Amendment reporter's privilege to withhold confidential information from a grand jury. The vote was 5-4, with Lewis Powell, the justice who provided the swing vote, writing a concurring opinion that acknowledged the importance to democracy and free expression of a journalist's ability to promise a source confidentiality and urged that courts balance these free-press interests against the grand jury's interest in law enforcement. Writing for the four dissenters in Branzburg, Justice Potter Stewart pointed to numerous cases in which the Supreme Court had limited government investigations in order to protect expressive freedoms, and said, "There is obviously a continuing need for an independent press to disseminate a robust variety of information and opinion through reportage, investigation, and criticism, if we are to preserve our constitutional tradition of maximizing freedom of choice by encouraging diversity of expression."

The basic balancing recommended under Branzburg seems not to have taken place in Leggett's case. Moreover, in issuing such a broad subpoena, the Justice Department would appear to have violated its own guidelines, developed after Branzburg and mindful of First Amendment protections for the press, regarding information in a reporter's possession. Those guidelines require that subpoenas not be used to obtain "peripheral, nonessential, or speculative information;" that they largely be limited to verification of published information; and that they "should avoid requiring production of a large volume of unpublished material."