On December 13 , I entered the Cook County Courthouse in Chicago prepared to be taken into custody and jailed for contempt. At issue was a subpoena demanding I answer questions about the whistleblower whose tip prompted me to investigate the fatal 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Were it not for that individual, who had disclosed the existence of dashcam video of the incident and provided a lead that enabled me to locate a civilian witness, we would not know the name Laquan McDonald. Once I had secured the autopsy report that revealed the boy had been shot 16 times, I published an article in Slate challenging the police account of the shooting. Months later, when the video was finally released, a cascade of events ensued: The superintendent of police was fired, as was the head of the agency that investigates police shootings; the state’s attorney was voted out of office; the United States Department of Justice initiated an investigation of the Chicago Police Department; and the officer who shot McDonald, Jason Van Dyke, was charged with first-degree murder. It was in the context of the murder case that I was subpoenaed. The judge, Vincent Gaughan, permitted Van Dyke’s lawyers to seek to compel me to testify on the basis of their claim, for which they offered no evidence, that the source had given me documents protected under the Garrity rule, which protects public employees from being compelled to incriminate themselves during internal investigations conducted by their employers. From the outset, I made it clear that I had received no Garrity-protected documents and that I would refuse to answer any questions that might reveal the identity of the source. There was nothing heroic about this stance. It was not a choice. I was simply doing my job as a reporter. The litigation was complicated by a gag order — more delicately referred to as “decorum order” — that Gaughan had imposed at the outset of the Van Dyke proceedings. As a result, some of the pleadings in this legal controversy over freedom of the press were sealed.

From left, Special Prosecutors Joseph Cullen, Joseph McMahon, and Defense Attorney Daniel Herbert with defendant Jason Van Dyke, right, at George Leighton Criminal Court Building on May 25, 2017 in Chicago. Photo: Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune/TNS/Getty Images

It was only during a hearing in open court on December 6 that the press and public became aware of the “fake news” thesis Dan Herbert, Van Dyke’s lead attorney, was advancing. He claimed I was not a reporter, but an activist — hence unprotected by reporter’s privilege — and had been engaged from the start in an anti-police campaign that did grievous harm to his client’s constitutional right to a fair trial. In the course of that campaign, he alleged, I had colluded with FBI agents who allowed me to sit in on interviews with two civilian witnesses to the shooting, and I had also conspired with the lawyers for McDonald’s family. Central to Herbert’s argument — if something so hallucinatory can be said to have a center — was the claim that I had drawn on knowledge gained from Garrity–protected statements to shape the accounts of civilian witnesses in a coordinated strategy designed to convict Van Dyke. Herbert’s thesis about my reporting may prove to have been a dress rehearsal for the trial. It reflects the general stance of the Fraternal Order of Police (which is widely believed to be paying for Van Dyke’s defense) with respect to any and all allegations of police misconduct. The FOP asserts in the strongest possible terms that the police are victims of a conspiracy in which the civil rights bar is aided and abetted by the media. In any particular case of alleged abuse, the accused officer is thus the real victim. Herbert closed his argument by invoking Brown v. Mississippi, a 1936 case in which the Supreme Court set aside the convictions of three black sharecroppers for the murder of a white farmer on the grounds that their confessions had been coerced by police torture. The three men had been repeatedly and mercilessly whipped; and one had been hung from a tree limb in a mock lynching that left rope scars on his neck. Van Dyke, Herbert argued, had suffered comparable harms from my reporting. “It’s the same thing legally,” he said, “as those sharecroppers that were tortured.” It was a stunning moment. The Laquan McDonald case invites comparison to the lynching of Emmett Till, another child of Chicago, in Mississippi in 1955. The dashcam video can be seen as the counterpart to the fateful decision of Till’s mother to have an open casket at her son’s funeral: a window through which a mutilated black body illuminates the violence that enforces structures of exclusion and inequality. Whatever the outcome of the murder trial, that is the light in which many Chicagoans are struggling to come to terms with the incident. So it was startling, even in the adversarial setting of the courtroom, to hear the assertion that it is Van Dyke who is in danger of being lynched. On December 13, my lawyers and I came to court prepared for several alternative scenarios. The issues had been fully briefed. Our first line of argument was that the subpoena failed to satisfy minimal criteria of relevance. Beyond that, we made clear that I would invoke reporter’s privilege. That is where things promised to get complicated, for the judge appeared to favor a narrow reading of the term “source” that would allow other lines of questioning so long as I was not explicitly asked the name of the source — questions I would refuse to answer. In the end, the hearing proved anticlimactic. Gaughan distributed a written order quashing the subpoena. He did not reach the issue of reporter’s privilege. “To uphold the subpoena of Jamie Kalven,” he wrote, “would be nothing more than a fishing expedition in search of information that the timeline of events, discovery documents, and testimony suggest simply does not exist.” The ruling has been hailed as a victory for freedom of the press. Needless to say, it was a relief for me. Yet the episode warrants a closer look for lessons it might yield.

Judge Vincent Gaughan presides over the Jason Van Dyke hearing at the Leighton Criminal Courts Building in Chicago on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016. Photo: Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune/AP