Reporter refusing to give up source risks fine, jail

When a judge gets around to asking the SI people who leaked confidential government information while a trial was in litigation, this case among others may be used as precedent:

• Editor & Publisher: AP: "DETROIT A lawyer urged a judge Wednesday to end a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter's claim that he had a Fifth Amendment right to refuse to identify unnamed sources who leaked information about a terrorism prosecutor.

A lawyer for former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino also asked that reporter David Ashenfelter of the Detroit Free Press be fined as much as $5,000 per day until he divulges who in the U.S. Justice Department helped him with a 2004 story about an ethics investigation....

• Ashenfelter's lawyer, Richard Zuckerman, said his client's Fifth Amendment right was properly asserted throughout the deposition, especially if a prosecutor believed it was a crime for someone to leak a document to him.

• "They're suggesting stolen government property ended up in a reporter's hands," Zuckerman told the judge."...

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