A lot of people have reached out to me and other members of the RANGE crew with questions and words of comfort following Alex Duggan’s story about the attempt to compel Erin Sellers to testify at the trial of the Spokane 3 — a move that every reporter dreads, and one we chose to fight.
For that piece, I gave a brief explanation of our position, and Alex interviewed Kelly McBride*, a senior Vice President at the Poynter Institute and a nationally recognized authority on journalism ethics, who gave a more thorough explanation than I could have about why reporters try to avoid being called to testify at all costs. On Thursday afternoon, our legal team handed us written confirmation that the defense who had tried to compel Erin’s testimony had backed down. The subpoena fight is over. Erin is free to cover the trial of the Spokane 3, which starts on Monday.
Our lawyers advised us not to publish anything ourselves until the matter was resolved. Now that it is, the RANGE team asked me to write something short:
Erin has covered the June 11 protest and its aftermath more closely than anyone in this city. She and I took the call from Ben Stuckart before the impromptu action had even begun. She was present throughout the afternoon and into the evening, including during a two-minute window near the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility’s lower gate where defendant Bajun Mavalwalla II was captured on her video, protesting.
Erin is the person on our team who knows this story inside and out. If she had been compelled, she would have also been sequestered, likely for the entirety of the trial. She wouldn’t have been allowed in the courtroom except to testify. We may have even been forced to log her out of RANGE’s work communications. Our plan for daily trial coverage would have been severely harmed, and might have collapsed completely.
We couldn’t let that happen.
Reporting is a tool of public awareness, and the facts journalists uncover are free to be wielded however anyone — prosecutors and defendants alike — see fit. Attempting to weaponize the reporters themselves, though, was a bridge too far for us as a news team. As in most of the rest of America, there are fewer reporters working in Spokane today than there have been at any time in the last century. We need every single one of them reporting the facts of our world as we find them. Without fear or favor, as the saying goes.
That’s especially true of the one reporter who — in the opinion of this editor — has covered June 11 and its aftermath more completely than anyone else.
So we challenged the witness list, but we couldn’t have done it alone. Our longtime partners at Lawyers for Reporters have advised us almost since RANGE’s founding. For this situation, they connected us with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP — a law firm internationally recognized for its media, First Amendment and intellectual property expertise.
Neither group was forced to help at all. Both chose to do so pro bono, and on very little notice. We are deeply grateful to everyone involved. The argument DWT put forth to the legal team who sought to call Sellers was straightforward: Erin's reporting is already public. What she saw, heard, and documented is in print and on video for anyone to examine. Compelling her to take the stand would add nothing new to the public record — it would only hamper her ability to add to that record.
I get why Mavalwalla’s legal team wanted her on the stand: She’s a great reporter.
That’s why, for us, her work was too important to muzzle, a team of some of the most knowledgeable lawyers in America agreed, and now all of Spokane, and anyone else who takes an interest in this case, will continue to benefit from her work.Erin will be in the room on Monday. RANGE will publish daily dispatches throughout the trial. And we’ll continue to lead coverage of a story of the deepest and gravest importance — not just to Spokane, but to the rights of all Americans.
We’ll see you in court.
*On a personal note: McBride spent over a decade of her career reporting in Spokane at the Spokesman, and it gave me warm feelings to read a veteran of our local journalism trenches defending a member of the current corps on the ground.
