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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Courts - "Woman who recorded cops acquitted of felony eavesdropping charges"

Recall these ILB entries from July 2 and July 10. Those stories involved videorecordings.

Today's story from the Chicago Tribune, reported by Jason Meisner and Ryan Haggerty, involves only an audio recording:

Frustrated, Tiawanda Moore quietly flipped on the recorder on her BlackBerry as she believed that two Chicago police internal affairs investigators were trying to talk her into dropping her sexual harassment complaint against a patrol officer.

But Moore was the one who ended up in trouble — criminally charged with violating an obscure state eavesdropping law that makes audio recording of police officers without their consent a felony offense.

On Wednesday, though, a Criminal Court jury quickly repudiated the prosecution's case, taking less than an hour to acquit Moore on both eavesdropping counts.

More from much later in the long story:
The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago last year challenging the law, saying it was unconstitutional to prevent people from openly recording police officers working in public. A federal judge dismissed the suit, but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear oral arguments next month in the ACLU's appeal of the decision.

"There's nothing private about a police officer doing his duties on the public way," said Harvey Grossman, legal director for the ACLU of Illinois. "The way that they police and conduct themselves is a matter of public importance."

But Pat Camden, a spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago, said the union supports the law because it prevents people from making baseless accusations against officers by recording them and then releasing snippets that don't reveal the full context of the incident.

Moore's case centered on an exception in the Illinois statute that allows citizens to obtain evidence through a surreptitious recording if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that a crime may be committed.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 25, 2011 01:03 PM
Posted to Courts in general