Police arrest newspaper editor for criticizing Florida cops

Declan McCullagh declan at well.com
Tue Jun 26 19:32:56 PDT 2001


Police in Key West, Flordia have arrested a newspaper editor for printing 
an article that criticized an internal police investigation, according to 
an Associated Press report. This brutish action by police and prosecutors 
should be widely denounced.

As of this afternoon, the Key West newspaper's site at kwest.com was still 
up (I read what appears to be one of the articles in question at 
http://kwest.net/~kwtn/local_news/01-06-15-KWTN-FDLE_Investigating_Police_Internal_Scandal.html). 
But while the server is still alive -- it responds to ping requests -- 
connections to port 80 are now refused. Unfortunately, the article is no 
longer in my cache.

It looks like the editor, Dennis Cooper, is being prosecuted for allegedly 
violating a state law. Under Florida law, it's a crime to disclose 
information about a police investigation -- even if you're the person who 
had filed a complaint alleging police wrongdoing, as Cooper seems to have done.

You can find contact information for Key West officials here:
http://www.keywestcity.com/directory.html
http://www.keywestcity.com/depts/police/policetelephone.html

I've copied the mayor, the chief of police, and other officials. If they 
would care to reply, I would be happy to extend them the usual courtesy of 
distributing their response unedited.

If anyone puts up a mirror site with the article, please let me know. And I 
urge you to write to the city officials copied above. (BTW I have verified 
that the below article did run on the AP wire.)

-Declan

---



More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list