Brendan Kirby, FOX10 News Investigative Reporter, on Grand Jury Secrecy, Body Camera Records, and Alabama's Open Records Act

A Justice Wrote a Warning Into His Own Ruling. Alabama Ignored It.

In October of 2023, in a small town on the Alabama–Florida line, a newspaper publisher and one of her reporters were arrested and charged with felonies over a story about how federal COVID relief money had been spent at the local school system. Four centuries after the fight this week is about, the limit is written down. The arrest happened anyway.

This is the Thursday conversation that closes week nine of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Sunday brought the written article. Saturday told the history of the Levellers, the printers and pamphleteers who wanted the limits on power written down and published without anyone’s permission. Tuesday carried it into the present. Today we close the week with a living voice — because rather than theorize about the distance between a document and its enforcement, it seemed better to ask a man who measures that distance for a living.

Brendan Kirby is an investigative reporter with FOX10 News in Mobile, Alabama. He has covered courts and government for three decades, beginning in Washington and Maryland and, since 2000, on the Gulf Coast, including fifteen years at the Mobile Press-Register and AL.com. He is a graduate of American University and the author of Wicked Mobile, a history of the rogues and scoundrels of the Port City’s three hundred years. His beat straddles two states with nearly identical open records statutes and completely different habits about obeying them.

The conversation runs along two threads. The first is what it actually costs to be the person who puts something on the record — and Brendan is candid that in his own case it has cost very little, which is not true everywhere and has not been true in every era. The second is the objection the Levellers’ opponents raised and never answered: once you write the limit down, somebody has to say what the words mean, and that authority has to sit somewhere.

Along the way: why criminal defendants almost never testify, and what jurors probably think about that even when instructed not to. Why he believes juries get it right more often than the public assumes, and why a system where the government always wins is a system with something wrong in it. What happened to the economics of local reporting, and what was actually lost when the gatekeeper role went away. The Atmore case and where it stands now in federal court. And Justice Scalia’s argument, from his 2011 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that a bill of rights is not what makes a country free — that the Soviet Union’s read better than ours on paper, and that what separates the two is structure rather than text.

Brendan covers these matters as a working journalist. He does not endorse candidates and does not advocate policy, and nothing here is offered as a partisan story. What is under examination is a mechanism, not a team.

Episode 9i of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — the fourth touchpoint of week nine, and the third voice. The article gives depth. The history gives roots. The application shows stakes. The interview puts a living face on all of it.

Recorded 08/02/2026. The federal litigation discussed is active and may have moved since.

The question we put to everything we examine: did this leave people more free, or more governed?

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction: Arrested for Publishing a Story 00:27 Episode Overview: Interview with Brendan Kirby 03:55 Interview Begins: Thirty Years of Investigative Journalism 06:56 The Courtroom Experience and the Value of Juries 11:37 Cameras in the Courtroom: Florida vs. Alabama 14:29 John Lilburne and the Right Against Self-Incrimination 16:13 Public Perception of the Fifth Amendment and Testifying 22:11 The Permanent Record and the Cost of Journalism 25:50 The Broken Economic Model of the Press 31:25 The Atmore Arrests: Press Freedom vs. Grand Jury Secrecy 39:28 Interpreting Written Laws and Open Records 44:00 The Alabama Supreme Court on Police Body Camera F