Lawyer’s Right to Hold Press Conference

Law enforcement officers from a task force that included federal and state officers entered the Detroit home of 20-year-old Terrance Kellom to arrest him. By the end of the encounter, Kellom had been shot ten times by an ICE officer who had a record of violence. Civil rights lawyer Nabih Ayad filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Kellom’s survivors, and as part of his advocacy he conducted a press conference to share damning evidence of police misconduct with the public. The court sanctioned Ayad for speaking to the press about materials produced in discovery because they were allegedly subject to a court order that protected the documents from public disclosure. However, the documents could not be considered secret because they had already been filed on the court’s docket by the defendant officer’s own attorney and were freely available to the public. In 2020 the ACLU of Michigan, along with the Detroit Branch of the NAACP and the Arab American Civil Rights League (ACRL), filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of Ayad, arguing that longstanding principles of common law and First Amendment jurisprudence protected attorneys’ public comment on publicly filed discovery materials. In September 2021 the Sixth Circuit vacated the sanctions order and remanded the case for additional factfinding regarding the documents that had been disclosed. (Kellom v. United States; ACLU Attorneys Mark P. Fancher and Dan Korobkin; co-counsel Chui Karega of the Detroit NAACP and Rula Aoun of ACRL.)