Now that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled North Carolina’s ag-gag law — as it applies to news-gathering — is unconstitutional, I can tell you that I violated it.
To be clear, I did not trespass, but I checked several of the law’s boxes. Likewise, the worker who agreed to document and obtain evidence did so at considerable financial and personal risk, and could also have been fined.
Four years ago I received a tip from the worker, who thought wastewater sludge being shipped to a compost facility in Sampson County was making him sick. To get a handle on the story, I needed to verify the shipper, DAK Americas, and the recipient, McGill Compost. And I needed sludge to take to an EPA-certified lab to learn what it contained.
But the worker and I had to defy the state’s ag-gag law to find out.
The Private Property Protection Act forbids employees from entering “non-public areas of a workplace” and “without authorization captures or removes the employer’s data, paper, records, or any other documents and uses the information to breach the person’s duty of loyalty to the employer.” That same provision applies to photographs and video.
Yes, the worker did that.
The law applies not just to employees but to “any person who intentionally directs, assists, compensates, or induces another person to violate this section.”
I induced. I directed. I assisted. Intentionally.
Had this story turned out differently, both the worker and I could have faced a fine of $5,000 per day,...
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