Monday, September 28, 2009

Shackelford: The Case for Hannah Giles   [Robert Costa]

Hannah Giles, the sophomore at Florida International University who posed as a prostitute in her ACORN exposé, has been sued by the community-organizing group for secretly taping its employees in Baltimore. She tells NRO that the suit is “silly.” Nonetheless, she’s taking the charges seriously, and has hired Kelly Shackelford, the chief counsel at the Liberty Legal Institute, to represent her in the case. Shackelford tells us that ACORN’s lawsuit is a “clear attempt to chill speech and to bully a young woman.”

“I don’t think that their allegations have any basis,” says Shackelford. “There’s a long history in this country of protecting independent journalism and holding people accountable. Punishing a citizen journalist for catching government abuse and waste would be travesty. Hannah is a citizen journalist. Her whole passion for her career is to be a journalist, to be an investigative journalist that uncovers abuse and inspires other people to take action to do the same.”

“Our question here is about the Maryland statute,” says Shackelford. “If it only applies to private conversations, fine, but there were numerous people participating in the conversation in question. The ACORN people got very loud. There were ten or twelve people in the room having conversations. Anybody who’s reasonable understands that this was not a private conversation. It’s all on tape.”

Shackelford says the case is important “not only because of the interpretation of the Maryland statute but the bigger point about how it is an attempt by ACORN to chill speech.” That, he says, is “antithetical to what this country is about.”

And, he says, ACORN can’t expect to garner much sympathy. “You have people at ACORN, on camera, offering to be co-conspirators in the sex trade of 13-year-olds. Balance that against everything in Hannah’s favor: their attempts to bully her, and her work in trying to keep the government accountable.”

You can read Giles’s interview with NRO here and my interview with Sen. Mike Johanns (R., Neb.) about the lawsuit here.

09/28 01:47 PMShare