What began this week as a pair of emails sent as part of a reporter’s due diligence has turned into a fight over the fundamental First Amendment right of press freedom.

On Tuesday, The Denver Gazette planned to run a story I wrote about the criminal case against one police officer charged in connection with Elijah McClain’s death in 2019. The story is based on the officer’s request to a judge in Adams County to review the charges for probable cause, a motion that is suppressed from public access.

But on Monday, Judge Priscilla Loew issued an order to stop us from publishing the story. Our attorney, Steve Zansberg, filed a motion asking the judge to vacate that order, which he says is plainly unconstitutional “prior restraint.”

After a further review of the constitutional issues at stake, Loew agreed with Zansberg’s arguments in a new order late Thursday, concluding that the state’s “interest in protecting grand jury secrecy in this case, where the grand jury has completed its deliberations, does not outweigh The Denver Gazette’s First Amendment right to publish truthful and lawfully-attained information.”

It’s also not certain, she wrote, that barring the story’s publication is necessary to ensure a fair trial.

The new order does have one mistake about the restricted files, though: Loew mentions “all the pleadings were all either marked suppressed or sealed,” which isn’t true. The copies I got had no markings at all on them indicating they were restricted.

Her order not to publish will be lifted at noon Monday to give the attorney general’s office a chance to appeal this new decision, though we’ve now learned they won’t seek an appeal.

Prior restraints are a means of governments suppressing information from publication, and the U.S. Supreme Court has said they are presumptively unconstitutional, calling prior restraints “the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.” Even in situations that raise national security interests or are at odds with competing constitutional protections, the court has considered prior restraint acceptable only if the harm done by reporting information “is both great and certain” and can’t be avoided by less restrictive measures.

A few weeks ago, I walked into the clerk’s office in the Adams County courthouse and asked for recent public filings in the cases of each of the police officers and paramedics charged in McClain’s death, since a hearing was scheduled for the next day. The stack of records the clerk handed me included filings in Nathan Woodyard’s case that were meant to be suppressed.

My editors determined we could run a story based on the records, because I had gotten them legally. And we decided it was in the public’s interest to understand why Woodyard’s attorneys asked the judge to review his indictments for probable cause.

An established body of case law protects publication of information that is truthful and legally obtained. In one case from 1985 with a set of circumstances extremely similar to what I’ve found myself in — which Loew apparently found persuasive — a reporter for the New York Daily News had published a story based on grand jury testimony in a criminal case against former New York Yankees player Joseph Pepitone, which the reporter discovered in the case file he had been given access to.

The trial judge ordered the reporter not to publish any more stories based on the grand jury materials. But the court’s appellate division overturned that order.

“It has frequently been stated that where a newspaper lawfully obtains truthful information about a matter of public significance, the State may not prevent its publication absent a need to further a State interest of the highest order,” read the appeal.

In what I intended as a gesture of good faith, I reached out on Monday morning to Attorney General Phil Weiser’s office, which is prosecuting the case, and Woodyard’s defense attorneys to let them know we would be running a story based on these records.

I decided it was best not to blindside them with the story when it published. As reporters, we have to make a lot of judgment calls based on gut feelings and what lets us sleep at night, and this felt like important due diligence. It’s a standard practice in journalism to give every subject of a story the chance to respond.

Then late Monday afternoon, we received an order from the judge that we could not publish the contents of the suppressed records and that I had to destroy any copies. We immediately alerted our attorney, who filed a request to lift the order, arguing it’s unconstitutional prior restraint.

When I talked to the attorney general’s spokesperson Monday morning, he told me he would get back in touch after he spoke with the case’s lead prosecutors. I expected that when I heard from him again, the attorney general’s office would want to have a conversation about the concerns they had over us publishing the story. While I would not have made any promises that we would kill the story, because we still would have had to make our decision about publishing independently of what the government wanted us to do, I absolutely would have been willing to hear their concerns.

So it was startling to instead be met with a surprise court order essentially forcing us not to publish the story under threat of contempt.

At 9 a.m. Monday morning, I never would have predicted it would be the start of a week fighting to publish information we believe is in the public’s interest to know. But this grew into something bigger than the story or me: Protecting press freedom, a bedrock of our democracy.

Julia Cardi covers policing and public safety for The Denver Gazette.