Scalia Apologizes Over Tape Incident

WASHINGTON —  Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, responding to complaints over a federal marshal’s erasing of journalists’ tape recordings last week, said he regretted the incident and sent a letter of apology to the two reporters.

“The action was not taken at my direction. I was as upset as you were,” Scalia said in a letter sent Friday to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In the future, he wrote, he would permit print reporters to record his speeches, but would continue to insist on his “First Amendment right not to speak on radio or television.” Since joining the high court in 1986, Scalia has barred audio and visual recordings when he speaks in public, although reporters are usually permitted to take notes.

The Supreme Court itself enforces a similar rule. Although reporters are permitted to scribble notes on court proceedings, they are forbidden from recording what is said. Television cameras are barred from the courtroom.

The court’s oral arguments are transcribed, but the printed transcript is usually not made available for several weeks. And under the court’s policy, the transcript does not identify which justices ask questions.

This no-recording policy sometimes results in different versions of a justice’s comment or question in various news stories. The same is true of speeches, as Scalia noted in his letter.

Ironically, Scalia suggested in his letter that his speech in Mississippi had been misquoted.

Allowing reporters to record his words “will, as you say, promote accurate reporting, so that no one will quote me as having said that ‘people just don’t revere [the Constitution] like they used to.’ ”

That quote was reported widely last week after Scalia spoke to the Presbyterian Christian School in Hattiesburg, Miss. It was reported by an Associated Press reporter whose tape of the speech had been erased by the marshal.

The AP reporter, Denise Grones, and Antoinette Konz, a reporter for the Hattiesburg American newspaper, had been invited by school officials to cover Scalia’s speech to a large crowd gathered in the gym. Scalia spoke about the importance of the Constitution and answered questions from students.

Although TV cameras were banned, the print reporters said they were not told that tape recordings were prohibited. Near the end of Scalia’s talk, Deputy Marshal Melanie Rube confronted the reporters and said their tapes must be erased. She told the reporters she was enforcing Scalia’s policy of prohibiting audio recordings.

Nehemiah Flowers, the U.S. marshal in southern Mississippi, defended the agent’s action. “The justice informed us that he did not want any recordings of his speech and remarks. And when we discovered that one, or possibly two, reporters were in fact recording, she took action,” he told AP.

Lucy A. Dalglish, executive director of the reporters committee, wrote to Scalia, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and to the U.S. Marshals Office to protest the incident.

“As you are certainly aware, the essence of the First Amendment’s free press clause is the right to gather and publish news without government interference,” she said in her letter to Scalia. “We hope that you will consider the public benefit of assisting members of the news media as they seek to report public statements by government officials.”

She also urged him to stress that security personal were not authorized to seize or confiscate recordings.

In his reply, Scalia called her concern “well justified” and said he would try to make sure the incident was not repeated. “The United States Marshals do not operate at my direction, but I shall certainly express that as my preference” that recordings not be confiscated, he wrote.