The Story of THE RAG! St. Mary's Today Newspaper · the Night a Sheriff, States Attorney and Posse of Deputies Stole the News

St. Mary's Weekly:

Black and White and Dread All Over

To spend an evening with Rossignol is to turn the clock back to the down-and-dirty days of police beat reporting when "legmen" chased ambulances to accidents and fires and police cruisers to the scenes of crimes. --- The Washington Post, April 8, 1991

In the short course of less than one year, a small-town newspaper which was run on a shoe-string was featured on the front page of two major newspapers and on network news, all due to covering the news with loud flashy headlines that 'shouted' the news rather than boring its readers to tears. In short, the news made news.

That was just the beginning, before long the newspaper would be the target of an organized effort by a county sheriff and his deputies and a candidate for states attorney to clean the paper off newsstands the night before an election and result in a landmark First Amendment case which is now the law of the land.

"The incident in this case may have taken place in America, but it belongs to a society much different and more oppressive than our own. If we were to sanction this conduct, we would point the way for other state officials to stifle public criticism of their policies and their performance. And we would leave particularly vulnerable this kind of paper in this kind of community.

Alternative weeklies such as St. Mary's Today may stir deep ire in the objects of their irreverence, but we can hardly say on that account that they play no useful part in the political dialogue. No doubt the public has formed over time its opinion of the paper's responsibility and reputation. If defendants believed its attacks to be scurrilous, their remedy was either to undertake their own response or to initiate a defamation action. It was not for law enforcement to summon the organized force of the sheriff's office to the cause of censorship

and dispatch deputies on the errands of suppression in the dead of night."

---Fourth Circuit, United States Court of Appeals - Rossignol v. Voorhaar Should police officers be allowed to round up newspapers that are critical of their actions to prevent the public from reading them?

The Fourth Circuit, United States Court of Appeals had this to say:

The whole purpose of the Ku Klux Klan Act was to prevent public authorities from violating constitutional rights through the use of nominally private means. Whether the rights be those of small papers and their readers or those of freedmen is not dispositive. The unlawfulness of private infringement of those rights under color of state law remains the same.

We would thus lose sight of the entire purpose of § 1983 if we held that defendants were not acting under color of state law. Here, a local sheriff, joined by a candidate for State's Attorney, actively encouraged and sanctioned the organized censorship of his political opponents by his subordinates, contributed money to support that censorship, and placed the blanket of his protection over the perpetrators. Sheriffs who removed their uniforms and acted as members of the Klan were not immune from § 1983; the conduct here, while different, also cannot be absolved by the simple expedient of removing the badge.

I believe St. Mary's Today brought more transparency to Southern MD law enforcement. I never had a problem with citizens learning what their law enforcement tax dollars were purchasing. I believe the more they knew about police work, the more support they would give us, and for the most part, I found that to be true. Any embarrassment caused by exposing our mistakes only served to make us stronger and more efficient, and to avoid those mistakes in the future.

To anyone on the job who argued that you were just out to bash us, I firmly pointed out that your dad was a police officer, and your son is now one. Doing what you did in "The Rag", was good, "in the trenches" journalism, which differed from merely printing the press releases written by the officers. The addition of pictures taken from the scenes gave everyone a better insight of crime, criminals, and what it was like on our streets.

I was a loyal subscriber for many years. I miss the paper, and wish it was still in operation.

Patrick A. Murphy - Retired Chief of Police, Berwyn Heights Police Dept.; Retired Commander, Southern Maryland Criminal Justice Academy; Charles County Sheriff's Dept. 1st. Lieutenant; United States Marine Corps

Travel along with the most feared man in Southern Maryland. So notorious even the mob backed down. Cops who went after him found themselves in federal court on the losing side. His name is Ken Rossignol and he packs a fully loaded Smith & Corona (or at least the digital equivalent).

Ken's ammo: words. He's a champion of the First Amendment and an old fashioned pain in the ass.

The story of St. Mary's Today is one about advocacy journalism coming to a community where the press wasn't known for acting this way. No more go-along to get-along.

There wasn't a hand providing nourishment that Rossignol wouldn't take a little flesh and muscle from. At one point or another Ken pissed off just about everyone, including a couple governors of Maryland and me. But he sold newspapers and those who hated him still read his words each and every week.

Dave Statter - Broadcast news reporter WUSA, WTOP in Washington, D.C. for 32 years, STATter911.com, Statter Communications LLC

"He talks about DWI and drugs and waste in government. Regardless of who's involved, he tells it like it is." Washington Post front page article April 8, 1991

Larry Millison - St. Mary's County Commissioner, Developer, Horse Breeder.