Newspaper publisher Larry Dobson crawled through brush last month to get three photos of Dodge County, Minn., officials investigating the drowning death of a 7-year-old boy, but his newspaper never published the photos. Instead, Dobson, 75, has been thrust into a First Amendment controversy after the sheriff’s office confiscated the memory card from his camera and held onto it for more than a week while Dobson’s actions were scrutinized for possible criminal violations, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The resulting brouhaha has become big news in farm communities west of Rochester, where the publisher of three weeklies and the sheriff have been trading barbs over whose rights may have been trampled in the wake of a small-town tragedy.
