Judge Blasts Prosecutor, Quashes Subpoenas in ‘Pottygate’ Probe
A Boston Globe reporter who broke news of a district attorney’s “pottygate probe” won’t have to reveal to a grand jury how he obtained the information.
A Massachusetts judge has quashed subpoenas of Globe reporter Jonathan Saltzman and two lawyers for a juvenile clerk magistrate investigated for obtaining a bathroom key from the district attorney’s locked office, the Republican reports.
Judge John Agostini ruled that Saltzman was protected from having to reveal his sources by the First Amendment, and the lawyers didn’t have to testify because of the attorney-client privilege, the story says. Nor was the information ever legally impounded, Agostini wrote, and its disclosure did not violate grand jury secrecy.
According to Saltzman’s Boston Globe article, published a year ago, Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel was investigating Christopher Reavey, clerk magistrate for the juvenile courts in Franklin and Hampshire counties, for asking a court officer to obtain a jury room bathroom key from the DA’s offices. Reavey says in letters to court officials that he wanted to make the bathroom available to lawyers and other officials when no jurors were there.
Reavey claims he incurred Scheibel’s wrath by questioning her need for three offices in the Hadley courthouse, the Globe says. “This I believe is the fuel for this abusive investigation,” he wrote in one of the letters.
But a prosecutor assigned to the case because of a conflict of interest by Scheibel’s office told the judge that the grand jury investigation of Reavey was not about a bathroom key, according to the Republic story. In an April hearing on the motions to quash, Essex First Assistant District Attorney John Dawley said Reavey was being investigated for alleged favoritism in handling juvenile court matters.
Agostini’s ruling, issued yesterday, chastised Dawley for the disclosure, the Republic story says. Such information should have been revealed in a closed hearing “rather than resorting to a public ambush,” Agostini wrote. The allegation, he said, “appears to be more for public consumption than for the issues of this motion. In any event, this information had a hollow ring.”
