EDINBURG (TX)
The Monitor
December 4, 2017
By Molly Smith
The former employer of a reporter called to testify in the John Feit murder trial is objecting to his testimony, according to court documents filed last week.
Feit, 85, is on trial for allegedly murdering schoolteacher Irene Garza in April 1960, when he served as a visiting priest.
The Dallas Morning News submitted an objection to the prosecution’s Nov. 21 subpoena of Brooks Egerton, a former investigative reporter who currently resides in Tennessee and works as a freelance writer and editor and has written about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
The judge presiding over the case has yet to issue a ruling on the objection.
Lawyers for The Dallas Morning News argue in the objection that under the Texas Free Flow of Information Act — also known as Texas reporter’s privilege — “a journalist and a news medium hold a testimonial privilege against being compelled to ‘testify regarding … any confidential or non-confidential unpublished information … obtained or prepared while acting as a journalist’.”
Egerton published a 2004 article titled “DA Refuses to Pursue Ex-Priest,” in which he interviewed “new witnesses” in the case — two former clergy members who worked with Feit and, according to the article, said he “incriminated himself in individual conversations with them many years ago.”
These witnesses are Rev. Joseph O’Brien, a now-deceased priest who worked with Feit at McAllen’s Sacred Heart Church — the location Garza was last seen alive — and Dale Tacheny, a former monk at a Missouri monastery where Feit was sent in 1963.
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