Follow
That
Story:
Tattered
Cover
Bookstore
Will
Appeal
Court
Order
to
Open
Records
in
Drug
Investigation
11/10/00
Two weeks ago, the Week Online reported that a judge had ordered Denver's Tattered Cover bookstore to honor a search warrant demanding that the store turn over records of a customer book purchase (http://www.drcnet.org/wol/157.html#bookstore). The police hoped to discover which of six residents at a trailer where a meth lab was found ordered books on methamphetamine manufacture from the bookstore. At the time, Tattered Cover owner Joyce Meskins and her attorneys had not decided to appeal. They had to weigh the possibility of losing a partial victory in the limitations the judge placed on the warrant's scope, Chris Finan of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) told DRCNet. On November 2nd Meskins and her attorney, backed by a powerful array of booksellers' and librarians' associations as well as civil liberties groups, announced she will appeal the ruling. In a press release from the ABFFE, Meskins said, "If we turn over this information, our customers will start wondering if we will ever do the same to them. It will undermine their confidence that we will do everything we can to protect the privacy of their purchase and make them afraid to buy controversial titles. That would be a tragedy for us, for them, and for free speech." She also expressed concern that police are using a book's contents to determine a suspect. "Reading a book is not a crime," she said. Her attorney, Dan Recht, told the Denver Post they plan to bypass the state appeals court by asking the Colorado Supreme Court to hear the case. The state high court has long been considered a friend of free expression. Recht called the ruling a "slippery slope" which would set a legal precedent for government snooping into people's reading habits, and he criticized police for overreaching in the name of fighting drugs. "There have been significant infringements to civil liberties over the past decade, and those are due to a disturbing degree to the war on drugs," he told the Post. The ABFFE has filed an amicus brief in the case, supported by the American Library Association, the Association of American Book Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the PEN American Center. The Tattered Cover cause has also drawn editorial support from the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. The News urged the bookstore to appeal the October ruling.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
