SUPREME COURT NOTEBOOK

Justices reject reporter's bid to protect source By Mark ShermanAssociated PressWASHINGTON (AP) - A newspaper reporter who has been ordered to divulge the identity of the source of classified information lost his bid Monday to get the Supreme Court to clarify whether journalists have a right to protect their confidential sources.Without comment, the justices rejected an appeal from New York Times reporter James Risen to revisit the court's 42-year-old ruling that has raised questions about journalists' ability to shield from public view the names of people who tell them government secrets.Risen detailed a botched CIA effort during the Clinton administration to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. His reporting is at the center of criminal charges against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling of disclosing government secrets.Federal prosecutors want to force Risen to testify about his sources at Sterling's trial, but Attorney General Eric Holder has suggested that the Justice Department could find a way to defuse the situation and not subject Risen to time in jail should he refuse to testify as ordered.Notes from a meeting with journalists last week taken by Associated Press General Counsel Karen Kaiser show that Holder said, "as long as I'm the attorney general, no reporter who is doing his or her job will go to jail. As long as I'm attorney general, someone who is doing their job will not get prosecuted." Department officials later added that Holder wasn't referring to any specific case.Risen argued that he has a right to protect his sources' identities, either under the U.S. Constitution or rules governing criminal trials. The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, had rejected Risen's bid to avoid being forced to testify.His Supreme Court appeal came amid a debate over where to draw the line between national security and press freedoms. The Obama administration has been more aggressive than its predecessors in pursuing leaks of government secrets, including reviewing journalists' phone and email records and seeking to compel reporters to testify. The Associated Press was the target of one such records effort.Joel Kurtzberg, an attorney for Risen, said Monday that prosecutors must now decide whether they will force the issue."The ball is now in the government's court. It can elect to proceed in the Sterling trial without Jim's testimony if it wants to. If they insist on his testimony and Jim refuses to testify, the court will need to have a hearing to determine if Jim is in contempt and, if so, what the consequence of that will be," Kurtzberg said."We are considering the next steps in this case," Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said after the court's action.Disclosures of subpoenas for the records and testimony prompted Congress to revive a proposal for a national media shield law, similar to laws in place in most states, which would afford a measure of protection to reporters and news media organizations from being required to reveal the identities of confidential sources. But it would not grant an absolute privilege to journalists.The last time the Supreme Court weighed in on reporters and confidential sources was in 1972, when the court held 5-4 in Branzburg v. Hayes that nothing in the Constitution's First Amendment protects reporters from being called to testify before grand juries.Risen has refused to speak with government attorneys about his sources, and he didn't testify before the federal grand jury that indicted Sterling in 2010 on charges of unauthorized retention and communication of national defense information, unauthorized conveyance of government property, mail fraud and obstruction of justice.The Associated Press and many other leading news organizations supported Risen's appeal. Also backing Risen was the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which said Risen's rejection by the high court should prompt Congress to pass "a robust federal shield law."--------Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.Treaty cannot be used in jilted wife's assault caseBy Mark ShermanAssociated PressWASHINGTON (AP) - A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that prosecutors may not rely on an international chemical weapons treaty to convict a woman who attacked her husband's mistress.The justices threw out the conviction of Carol Anne Bond, who was prosecuted under a 1999 law based on the chemical weapons treaty. Bond served a six-year prison term after being convicted of using toxic chemicals that caused a thumb burn on a friend who had become her husband's lover.The intent of the chemical weapons treaty was to prevent a repeat of the use of mustard gas in World War I or toxic weapons in the Iraq-Iran war in the early 1980s, not "an amateur attempt by a jilted wife to injure her husband's lover," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.Roberts contrasted John Singer Sargent's massive painting, "Gassed," with its depictions of men who have been blinded by mustard gas, with Bond's actions. "There are no life-sized paintings of Bond's rival washing her thumb," he said.Pennsylvania laws are sufficient to deal with threats posed by a woman in a love triangle, he said."In sum, the global need to prevent chemical warfare does not require the Federal Government to reach into the kitchen cupboard, or to treat a local assault with a chemical irritant as the deployment of a chemical weapon," Roberts said.The case posed potentially significant questions about the federal government's power to make and enforce treaties. The justices resolved the case without reaching that issue, although Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas said they would have.Bond, unable to bear any children of her own, was excited for her best friend Myrlina Haynes when the woman announced her pregnancy. But that was before Bond learned that the baby's father was her husband of more than 14 years, Clifford Bond.Vowing revenge, Bond, a laboratory technician, stole the chemical 10-chloro-10H phenoxarsine from the company where she worked and purchased potassium dichromate on Amazon.com. Both can be deadly if ingested or exposed to the skin at sufficiently high levels.Bond's efforts were obvious enough that Haynes noticed chemicals had been spread on her door handle and in the tailpipe of her car. Haynes suffered a minor burn. But believing local police did not do enough to investigate, she called the United States Postal Service after finding more of the chemicals on her mailbox. Postal inspectors arrested Bond after they videotaped her going back and forth between Haynes' car and the mailbox with the chemicals.Instead of turning the domestic dispute case over to state prosecutors, a federal grand jury indicted Bond on two counts of possessing and using a chemical weapon. The grand jury based the charges on a federal anti-terrorism law passed to fulfill the United States' international treaty obligations under the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction.Bond pleaded guilty.In an earlier stage of the case, the high court unanimously rejected prosecutors' arguments and lower court rulings that prevented Bond from even challenging her conviction.Company didn't induce patent infringement WASHINGTON (AP) - A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Monday that a company is not liable for inducing patent infringement if someone other than the company carries out some of the steps leading to infringement.The justices unanimously ruled Monday that Internet content delivery company Limelight Networks Inc. did not infringe on the patented system for managing images and video owned by rival Akamai Technologies Inc.Akamai claimed Limelight used some of its patented methods for speeding content delivery, and then illegally encouraged its customers to carry out the remaining steps. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed, but the Supreme Court reversed.Justice Samuel Alito said all the steps for patent infringement must be performed by a single party. Since there was no direct infringement, Alito said there could be no inducement.The case drew interest from tech giants including Google and Oracle, which have been sued frequently by so-called "patent trolls," companies that buy patents and force businesses to pay license fees or face costly litigation. They had urged the high court to overturn the Federal Circuit in order to limit the growing number of patent infringement lawsuits.In another patent case Monday, the high court also unanimously reversed a Federal Circuit decision in a patent dispute over heart rate monitors. Medical device company Biosig Instruments sued exercise equipment maker Nautilus Inc. for allegedly infringing its monitor's design.Writing for the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the appeals court had used the wrong standard in determining that Biosig's patent was not too vague to pass muster. The Supreme Court remanded the case and instructed the appeal court to use a more exacting standard.The cases are Limelight Technologies, Inc. v. Akamai Technologies, Inc., 12-786; and Nautilus, Inc. v. Biosig Instruments, Inc., 13-369.Published: Wed, Jun 04, 2014