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Court rules that publishing drivers license details broke the lawand First Amendment is no defense

In what could prove to be a consequential decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Friday that the Chicago Sun-Times improperly obtained and disclosed personal information from motor vehicle records, and that the papers actions were not protected by the First Amendment. The decision by a three-judge panel allows a lawsuit against the paper, brought by five Chicago police officers who claim their privacy rights were violated, to proceed.

With its ruling, the court tackled a question that US courts have rarely if ever addressed: whether the First Amendment protects the publication of material that the press itself has unlawfully acquired. In this case, the judges ruled, it does notpartly because, in the courts view, the material in question was of marginal public value.

The cases underlying facts are colorful and tragic. In 2004, R.J. Vanecko, a nephew of Richard M. Daley, then the mayor of Chicago, had been drinking for eight hours before he punched a 21-year-old man, David Koschman, outside a Division Street bar. Koschman fell and hit his head, and died days later of a brain injury.

The Chicago Police Department investigated the incident, and at one point placed Vanecko in an eyewitness lineup, with five officers acting as fillers. Eyewitnesses failed to identify Vanecko as the perpetrator, so no charges were filed and the department closed the investigation in March 2011.

But suspicions lingered that the department had manipulated its investigation to protect Vanecko because of his family connections. The Sun-Times dug into the case and published a series of reports criticizing the investigation, including a Nov. 21, 2011, story about the Vanecko lineup. Under the headline Daley Nephew Biggest Guy on Scene, But Not in Lineup, the story suggested that several of the officers too closely resembled Vanecko for the lineup to be reliable.

The Sun-Times published lineup photos and the fillers names, along with their birth months and years, their heights and weights, and their hair and eye colors. The paper obtained the photos and names from the police department through a public records request. But apparentlyand crucially, for the legal analysisthe paper obtained the officers physical information from motor vehicle records maintained by the Illinois Secretary of State.

Eventually, a special prosecutor investigated Koschmans death, and in December 2012, eight years after the fatal incident, Vanecko was indicted and charged with one count of involuntary manslaughterto which he pleaded guilty in January 2014.

Along the way, the case took a bizarre turn: The officers sued the Sun-Times, claiming the paper had violated the federal Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) by publishing their physical information.

The DPPA and personal information

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Why five police officers can sue the Chicago Sun-Times