In the never-ending quest to pump content into the vast electronic wasteland of Internet publishing, there's infinite room for error. Especially given an industry so full of hungry greenhorns.
That, at least, seems to be the best explanation for Digital Cities Denver's publication and retraction of a 5-year-old grand jury report about a series of alleged environmental crimes at Colorado's notorious Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.
Published last week and then whisked off the site Friday for legal review, the report allegedly was an uncensored version of a damning document issued by the grand jury in 1992. But those involved in the case for the past five years say the report has long been in public circulation, and has no bearing on the continuing legal battles over Rocky Flats.
"We published the report five years ago; then it was news," said Patricia Calhoun, the editor of a Denver weekly paper, Westword. "But the story's moved way past that."
Even though jury members' lips are legally sealed, almost no one doubts that the Rocky Flats grand jury has a story well worth telling. Created in 1989, the panel scoured thousands of crates of evidence and listened to hundreds of hours of testimony. Then in 1992, two and a half years after they began, the jury whittled all that information into criminal indictments against eight people at the US Department of Energy and contractor Rockwell International.
But when federal prosecutors at the Justice Department arranged a US$18.5 million plea bargain with Rockwell and told the grand jurors to go home and keep their traps shut, the jurors rebelled. They hired a well-known Washington lawyer, Jonathan Turley, to sue the government for the right to release not only their findings, but their tale of the Justice Department's betrayal of its mission.
And apparently, their tale of betrayal holds enough water to compel Federal District Court Judge Richard Matsch to agree to hear their complaint that the Justice Department obstructed the investigation, then sold the jury down the river.
But as Calhoun notes, the report published by Digital Cities Denver has next to no impact on the case as it now stands.
"I can't really see why they bothered to take it down," she said. "I mean, when the grand jurors filed their complaint a year ago, the Department of Justice argued that it should be dismissed because almost all the relevant information was already in the public realm."
At Denver's year-old online publishing concern, however, content editor Gil Asakawa is now tight-lipped about the report. And at the marginally older Digital Cities home office in Alexandria, Virginia, spokesman Bill MacIntosh will say only that, "We think the issues around disseminating sealed court documents are very complex."
