The Justice Department has decided not to pursue the subpoenas it issued to three bookstores in its ongoing investigation into the finances of Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey (News, Sept. 3).
The subpoenas issued to Arundel Books in Los Angeles and Seattle, Olsson's Books in Washington, D.C., and Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla. demanded records of purchases made by Torricelli and seven others going as far back as 1995. The government gave up its request after the three bookstores said they would file a motion to quash the subpoenas and enlisted the help of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.
Chris Finan, president of ABFFE, said that the subpoenas were "extremely broad" and "would have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of all bookstore customers." He called the government's decision not to pursue the matter a "victory for customer privacy."
Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, told PW, "I think that this was an acceptable way to resolve this. It would be an undue burden on us to come up with those records. I feel very strongly that those are the kinds of records that we wouldn't want to turn over. There are conflicting interests at hand. There are various bodies that want certain pieces of evidence. It might not even occur to some of those kinds of people that this is a violation of our First Amendment rights."
This is the third recent case in which the government's efforts to obtain bookstore records have been thwarted. Earlier this year, a court issued a search warrant to Amazon.com requesting records of shipments of sexually explicit CDs to customers in the Cleveland area. After resistance from Amazon's lawyers, the warrant was never executed. In 2000, a subpoena issued to several Borders stores in the Kansas City region was quashed on First Amendment grounds.
A fourth case, in which a search warrant was issued to the Tattered Cover in Denver last April has been winding its way through the courts. The breadth of the original warrant has been narrowed, but the store has appealed a ruling that would force it to turn over some information to the Colorado Supreme Court.
