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Journal vs. Keker: It's your fault!

By Mark Obbie

A little over a week ago, I chided The Wall Street Journal for missing the impending guilty plea of Dickie Scruggs and wondered why the paper hadn't sought payback from Scruggs' defense counsel, John Keker. It took a while, but payback time it is, compliments of Dan Slater at the Journal's Law Blog. That blog is edited by Ashby Jones, who shared a byline with Paulo Prada on the story in question. The story, which previewed the Scruggs trial and quoted Keker trash-talking the prosecution, was published mere hours before Scruggs pled out. Slater ponders whether Keker stepped over an ethical line by acting too convincingly that he believed his client's not-guilty plea.  One nuance that gets lost in Slater's comments and his quote of a letter to the editor: The story obviously was produced days or weeks before publication, so Keker didn't utter his quotes necessarily on the eve of the about-face. So my questions stand: Did the reporters not exact a promise from Keker to give them a heads-up if the story was about to change? Did Keker screw them by not tipping them? Or did the reporters simply not get close enough to the truth, either because they stopped reporting too soon or didn't ask the right questions? It's still not clear to me what happened, but it ain't pretty!

Full post as published by Lawbeat on March 24, 2008 (boomark / email).