Times Leader, April 15

Judge says Times Leader reporters don’t have to participate in prison suit

By John Davidson
Times Leader Staff Writer

A federal judge has ruled that two Times Leader reporters do not have to testify or turn over documents to Luzerne County and the Luzerne County Correctional Facility Board as part of an ongoing lawsuit.

The county and the board are defendants in a civil rights lawsuit that was brought against them by former corrections officer Genevieve Butczynski, who claims she was suspended and then forced into early retirement for comments she made to Times Leader reporters Dave Weiss and Terrie Morgan-Besecker criticizing security procedures at the prison.

As part of their defense, the board and the county sought to compel Weiss and Morgan-Besecker to testify and hand over prison documents they referenced in several news stories.

The reporters wrote a story in fall 2003 detailing allegations of rampant misconduct and negligence at the prison after double-homicide suspect Hugo Selenski escaped out a window with a rope made of bed sheets.

In the days after the escape, two employees at the correctional facility, Lts. John Barry and Butczynski, spoke to the two reporters about what they described as widespread negligence at the prison.

On Oct. 15, 2003, the Times Leader printed an article by Weiss and Morgan-Besecker about security procedures at the facility that included comments from Barry, a 16-year veteran, and Butczynski, a 20-year-veteran.

The article also cited dozens of written misconduct reports reviewed by Weiss and Morgan-Besecker that painted a picture of a prison struggling to overcome security deficiencies. The reports told of multiple drug-related incidents at the facility in recent years, including an overdose.

After the article appeared, the board wanted to know who gave the reports to Weiss and Morgan-Besecker. According to U.S. District Judge James M. Munley’s ruling, the board believed Barry and Butczynski were the source of the reports and sought to compel the reporters to verify that claim.

But Munley wrote in his decision that the news articles "are ambiguous at best as to whether Butczynski and Barry were the ones who provided the reports."

In addition, Munley cited a Pennsylvania shield law that protects reporters from disclosing sources used in stories. Exceptions to that law, Munley wrote, must pass the so-called Riley test, which refers to the 1979 case Riley v. City of Chester.

In order to force the reporters to divulge the source of the prison reports, the board would have had to exhaust all other available sources of information, prove the reporters were the only source of the information, and prove that the information was crucial to their case.

The board’s request for testimony and documents from Weiss and Morgan-Besecker did not meet those standards, Munley said.

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