What is the real issue in the case of Josh Wolf, who has spent six months in a San Francisco jail for refusing to turn over a videotape of a violent demonstration against a Group of Eight meeting in which a police car was damaged? The Washington Post says that unless a mediation session today breaks the impasse, he will likely remain imprisoned at least until the current grand jury’s term expires in July. The Post notes that no confidential sources are involved and that Wolf sold part of the tape to local television stations and posted another portion on his blog. Wolf, 24, told PBS’s “Frontline” that he wants to establish “that what I chose to release was what I chose to release, and that I wasn’t an investigator for the state.”
Federal prosecutors took over the case from state authorities on grounds that San Francisco’s police department receives U.S. funding. Martin Garbus, Wolf’s attorney, says Wolf “is staying in jail for close to 200 days so they can investigate who broke the taillight on a cop car.” U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan says Wolf’s resistance “is apparently fueled by his anointment as a journalistic martyr” and that he needs “to come to grips with the fact that he was simply a person with a video camera who happened to record some public events.”
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/07/AR2007030702454.html