Speech News, Supreme Court Case

Supreme Court halts turnover of secret IRA tapes

Wire Report
Wednesday, October 17, 2012

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the Justice Department from forcing Boston College to turn over interviews that academic researchers recorded with a former Irish Republican Army member.

The high court today stayed an order by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the school give the Justice Department portions of recorded interviews with convicted IRA car bomber Dolours Price. Federal officials want to forward the recordings to police in Northern Ireland investigating the IRA’s 1972 killing of a Belfast woman.

Price and other former IRA members were interviewed between 2001 and 2006 as part of the Belfast Project — a resource for journalists, scholars and historians studying the long conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.

The stay granted by Justice Stephen Breyer ends Nov. 16 if there’s no appeal to the Supreme Court.

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