Hansen, however, has more immediate concerns. He's got to figure out how he's going to pay Richardson, but he has to be careful whose largesse he accepts: The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center has offered to help him raise funds, but he believes that would only lend credence to Wallace's bias assertion. A more promising lead comes from the Society of Professional Journalists, where Christine Tatum, the head of SPJ's Chicago-based legal defense fund, is looking into what her association can do.
"These cases have a way of snowballing," Tatum says. "And I think it's very telling that this is a misdemeanor that the feds are absolutely not dropping."
Susan Goldstein
Colorado Daily reporter Brian Hansen has made his own headlines.
Just before he was arrested, Brian Hansen (kneeling at left) takes notes while Forst Service officer Chuck Dunfee speaks to protesters.
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Boulder Congressman Mark Udall, who learned about the case from Hansen, has similar concerns, as he expressed in a July 5 letter to Assistant Attorney General Robert Raben. After noting that "I am not attempting to second-guess the decisions of the arresting officials or the course that this case has taken over the past year," Udall stated, "I do think that prosecutors, in considering whether to press a case, should recognize that there is public interest in such events as this protest, that members of the press are likely to seek to cover them, and that a reporter could inadvertently be arrested because of misunderstandings as to his role and presence at the site."
Alan Salazar, Udall's chief of staff, says the congressman took the action he did because "reporters have to cover controversial issues and crime scenes, and if you begin to arrest reporters when they're close to a scene, that can have a chilling effect on the First Amendment."
Salazar adds that Udall would be equally troubled if evidence suggested that the government was using closure areas to prevent the exercise of free speech. "These are hard lines to draw, but the congressman's main interest is that they be drawn on the side of the public's right to know about these controversies. You wouldn't want the federal bureaucracy to use a closure as an excuse or a tool to hide their own mistakes."
No one at the Justice Department has gotten back to Udall -- and John Russell, a Washington, D.C., spokesman for the department says he can't talk about a case under litigation. Likewise, Jeff Dorschner, speaking for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Denver, restricts his comments to the charges against Hansen and other procedural matters. As for Forest Service public-information officer Young, who was in Vail last July but didn't see the final act on Mill Creek Road (he remained at the base of the Vista Bahn for most of the day), he refuses to talk about his testimony and touches on the facts of the case in only the most general way.
"Our job was to open the road, and the closure order made it very clear that anybody who didn't leave the closure area in fifteen minutes was subject to arrest," Young says. "Now, what we didn't do was poll each person about what their occupation was or whether they were this person or that person. We told them, 'Everybody needs to leave the area, these are the boundaries,' and anybody who didn't leave got arrested. And that's what happened to Brian. He didn't leave, and he was arrested."
No one needs to tell Hansen that. But as he waits to find out if this tale is near its conclusion or destined for additional chapters, he can't help but feel frustrated that the Denver dailies -- especially the News, whose parent company, E.W. Scripps, so recently feted him for his journalistic accomplishments -- haven't seen fit to write anything about his dilemma since the time of his arrest last year.
"If it had been a Post or a News reporter who'd been ordered off that mountain, they would have gone ballistic," he says. "They wouldn't have stood for it -- and yet they haven't printed a word about what's happening to me. But if I get convicted, it'll be just one more log that the government can throw on the fire to deny the media access in situations like the one I was in. That could hurt the news-gathering rights of all journalists -- and it would hurt the public, too."
