Vanessa Leggett is an American freelance journalist and lecturer who was jailed by the US Justice Department for 168 days for protecting sources and research notes for an independent book about a federal murder-for-hire case.
15 Facts About Vanessa Leggett
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Vanessa Leggett died from 13 gunshot wounds to her face and chest.
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In 1998, during a series of jailhouse interviews of Roger Angleton, a suspect in a murder-for-hire plot, Vanessa Leggett compiled notes and hours of audio tape that reportedly detailed how Roger's brother Robert hired him to murder his brother's wife Doris.
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On June 19,2001, US District Judge Melinda Harmon ordered Vanessa Leggett to appear in court the next day with her notes and tapes for a book she was researching about the murder.
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Vanessa Leggett, appearing in court on June 20,2001, refused to turn over her notes, citing freedom of the press.
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Vanessa Leggett was then held in civil contempt of court and jailed by the US Justice Department for refusing to turn over her notes.
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Vanessa Leggett appealed her case in 2001 to the United States Supreme Court.
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The Center for Individual Freedom filed an amicus brief in support of Vanessa Leggett's petition asking the US Supreme Court to hear her case.
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From 1995 to 2016 Vanessa Leggett taught criminology, as well literature and writing courses, at the University of Houston-Downtown, as a faculty member for the Department of English as well as for the university's Criminal Justice Training Center, where she taught Texas police recruits and lectured veteran homicide investigators.
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Vanessa Leggett signed a book contract in 2002 with Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, about the Angleton murder for a reported $600,000 advance.
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Vanessa Leggett lectured at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; the Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine; and the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement.
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Vanessa Leggett gave the keynote address at the Institute for Ethics and Journalism's 2007 conference, which was sponsored by the Knight Foundation's Program in Journalism Ethics and Washington and Lee University's department of journalism and mass communications.
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Vanessa Leggett has given talks to the New York City Bar Association and the FBI Academy's Behavioral Science Unit.
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Vanessa Leggett wrote a Texas Monthly article for its July 2002 issue titled "Doing Time" about her five-and-a-half months spent behind bars at the Federal Detention Center in Houston.
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Vanessa Leggett wrote two editorial pieces for the Houston Chronicle, titled "Down the Slippery Slope to Newspeak" published in 2004, and "Rosenthal Deserved Jail Time" published in 2008.