Confidential sources.

• Author: Scarce, Rik
• Position: Sociology student jailed for refusing to identify research interviewees - Column

In this time of eroding individual and communal rights, nowhere are the hallmarks of "free" society fading as fast as here in Spokane, Washington. This is not a new role for the city. It was here that the Industrial Workers of the World waged one of the nation's first free-speech fights. Early in this century, Spokane's elites jailed members of the IWW for "soap-boxing" - speaking out against the use of exploitative employment brokers by capitalists.

Now, decades after the IWW struggled and lost here, Spokane again is the site of a constitutional fight, one that I am at the center of. Fortunately, jail conditions have improved since IWW members died of pneumonia while under arrest, but the mentality has not. I find myself in the midst of a First Amendment case with little community support and a prosecutor whose mentality harkens back to the anti-IWW days.

I was jailed on May 14 for refusing to answer a Federal grand jury's questions about my research on the animal-rights movement. In August 1991, while I was on the East Coast vacationing and conducting research, an animal-experimentation laboratory was vandalized at Washington State University, where I am a doctoral student in sociology. Several animals were set free or stolen. The damage amounted to $100,000. Ron Coronado, who was house-sitting for me when the raid occurred, was identified as a suspect. I had met him while I was researching my book, Eco-Warriors: Understanding the Radical Environmental Movement. Coronado has admitted faxing a news release about the raid to the Associated Press, but he has denied any other involvement.

The Government is attempting to force me to testify about confidential interviews I may have conducted with those responsible for the raid. Though I am not a suspect, I was jailed under a Federal statute that allows the incarceration of "recalcitrant grand-jury witnesses." In coming after me with the clumsy instrument of the grand jury, the Government is attempting to bulldoze its way through the issues I have raised regarding the crucial nature of social research in this society. A Federal district court ruled in February that a newspaper reporter in my situation would have to testify or go to jail. A Federal appeals court appears to be of the same mind, though its reasoning is a mystery - it announced its opinion in May but has yet to publish it. Recently, I requested that the Supreme Court review my case.

Past Supreme Court decisions have construed the...