Biography
Judith Miller was a New York Times reporter jailed for eighty-five days in 2005 for refusing to identify a confidential source to a federal grand jury. The grand jury, directed by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, was investigating who had disclosed that Valerie Plame worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Miller had never written an article about Plame; she was subpoenaed over conversations she had had with a source, and she refused to testify, arguing that a promise of confidentiality does not lapse because a prosecutor finds it inconvenient. Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the federal district court in Washington held her in civil contempt on October 1, 2004; the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the order, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in June 2005. She was jailed on July 6, 2005 at the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia — civil contempt, so confinement was coercive rather than punitive, and would have ended the moment she agreed to testify. She was released on September 29, 2005 after her source, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, personally reaffirmed to her that he waived confidentiality; she testified the following day, and again at Libby's trial in January 2007. Her jailing became the central example in the campaign for a federal shield law, which has still not passed. Miller left the Times later in 2005 after her role in the paper's pre-war reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had come under sustained internal criticism, and afterwards wrote for other outlets and published a memoir. She was born in New York City on January 2, 1948.
