The Illinois Supreme Court today, struck down the state’s eavesdropping law, one of the strictest in the nation that made audio recording of any person, even in public, illegal unless that person gave their consent. This represents a huge victory for independent video producers like myself who potentially expose themselves to criminal prosecution for simply doing our jobs, recording footage in pubic, including b-roll, interviews etc.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-supreme-court-eavesdropping-law-20140320,0,6684656.story
By Steve Schmadeke
Tribune reporter
9:59 a.m. CDT, March 20, 2014
The Illinois Supreme Court this morning struck down the state’s eavesdropping law, one of the strictest in the nation that made audio recording of any person, even in public, illegal unless that person gave their consent.
The court ruled that the law “criminalizes a wide range of innocent conduct.”
“The statute criminalizes the recording of conversations that cannot be deemed private: a loud argument on the street, a political debate on a college quad, yelling fans at an athletic event, or any conversation loud enough that the speakers should expect to be heard by others,” the court said in its ruling.
“None of these examples implicate privacy interests, yet the statute makes it a felony to audio record each one. Judged in terms of the legislative purpose of protecting conversational privacy, the statute’s scope is simply too broad,” the justices ruled.
The ruling comes two years after a federal appeals court in Chicago found unconstitutional the law’s ban on recording police officers in public. The court prohibited enforcement of that part of the law shortly before Chicago hosted the NATO summit.
The case involves Annabel Melongo, who recorded three telephone conversations she had with a court reporter supervisor at the George Leighton Criminal Courts complex.
Melongo called to correct an apparent error in a court transcript, then posted audio of the phone calls on a website she’d created to publicize her computer-tampering case. Prosecutors charged her in 2010 with six counts of eavesdropping and she spent more than 20 months in jail, unable to make bail.
The jury deadlocked at her 2011 trial and, later that year, her attorneys filed a motion arguing that the Illinois Eavesdropping Act was unconstitutional. In 2012, Judge Steven J. Goebel agreed, dismissing the charges. Prosecutors filed an appeal.
During arguments before the state Supreme Court, Melongo’s attorney said the law improperly gave sweeping powers to government officials to suppress First Amendment rights.
“It gives government officials and public actors unilateral and unfettered right to deny the press or citizens the right to record, gather information and disseminate information about the government,“ Melongo’s attorney Gabriel Platkin said.
By requiring consent to record even public actions, the law would allow a police officer to tell citizens “you can’t watch what we’re doing, pay no attention to what your government is doing.”
Assistant State’s Attorney Alan Spellberg countered that the state legislature had crafted the law so it protected “conversational privacy” while upholding other constitutional rights.
He said Melongo’s actions had “negate(d) the privacy rights of the other members of the conversation,” and he told the justices the issue before them was one of legislative policy outside their authority, not a constitutional one.
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