10/29/2022
Forty-six years ago today, one of the Florida Supreme Court's major media law decisions involving a reporter's confidential sources became final. In Lucy Morgan v. State of Florida, the court faced a major problem.
St. Petersburg Times' reporter Lucy Morgan had been convicted of criminal contempt for refusing to name her confidential sources in a news investigation into official corruption in Dade City, Florida. The criminal conviction remained on the books for three years as Morgan appealed it.
She later remembered that her children grew up worried about "when" mom would have to go to jail. She eventually took her case all the way to the Florida Supreme Court.
On October 27, 1976, the decision by Justice Joseph Hatchett became final law. Hatchett wrote that the First Amendment shields reporters from certain kinds of government coercion. Specifically, government cannot "force a newspaper reporter to disclose the source of published information, so that the authorities can silence the source."
With those words, the Court reversed Morgan's criminal conviction. More than four decades later, this decision remains the law of Florida. Morgan later wrote that the uncertainty of those three years took its toll on her and her family but left her "with a renewed faith in the people around us and in the courts of Florida."
