Brendan Kirby, FOX10 News Investigative Reporter, on Grand Jury Secrecy, Body Camera Records...
- Jeff Kellick
- Aug 13
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 16
Interview Episode for Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 9i
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 Footage
48:47 The Overreach of Grand Jury Secrecy
51:16 Antonin Scalia on the Structure of a Free Government
55:35 Advice for Citizens: How to Stay Informed Locally
01:01:14 Post-Interview Reflection: The Mechanism of Transparency
01:02:46 The Liberty Test: When the Law Works Against Openness
01:05:15 Conclusion and Preview of Next Week
📚 Companion article: “The Levellers — The Lost Constitution,” Article 9 of Self-Evident. https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-levellers-the-lost-constitution
🔗 Brendan’s reporting: fox10tv.com. His book, Wicked Mobile, is available from The History Press and wherever books are sold.
Consequential Actions — Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, Episode 9i: The Thursday Conversation with Brendan Kirby
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