| Vanessa Leggett is a freelance journalist who spent 168 days in in a federal detention center in downtown Houston, the longest incarceration of any U.S. writer who has based rejection of a grand jury subpoena on First Amendment rights.
She was jailed in July, 2002 by U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon after she refused to give a federal grand jury her notes and tapes of interviews with confidential sources for a book about the 1997 killing of Doris Angleton in River Oaks, Texas. Leggett was freed from jail early in 2002.
A federal appeals court ruled against Leggett last year, when she was still in jail. This led to her appeal to the Supreme Court which also ruled against her.
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