Sullivan knew one thing: according to their lawyer, Woodfox and Wallace were willing to do an interview. “They were anxious to talk about it and tell their side of things. Their lawyer was totally on board with this,” Sullivan says. In mid-October 2008, Sullivan renewed her request to prison officials to interview the prisoners. But again, they nixed the idea. “Then, I made my pitch to [the prison] lawyer about why they [the prisoners] should be granted their public right to speak,” Sullivan says. She got another “no.”

Finally, Sullivan took her case to the prison spokeswoman. “You may absolutely not interview these two inmates,” she told Sullivan over the phone. “And if we find out that you have interviewed them, we will return them to solitary confinement.” Startled, Sullivan asked the spokeswoman: “How can you make a rule like that?” “It’s a security issue,” Sullivan recalls the spokeswoman responded. “We have the right to determine who our inmates speak to, and who they don’t. We’re not granting you permission. And if you do this anyway, then they will be punished.”

Sullivan knew she had a way to contact them. The inmates had phone privileges, and each had a list of people to whom they were allowed to speak. On that list was their lawyer, Trenticosta. He saw the prison’s stance as a raw assertion of power, and maintained that denying Sullivan permission for an interview violated his clients’ constitutional rights. So when Sullivan approached Trenticosta about arranging a phone call, he was eager to cooperate. Despite the threat of a return to solitary confinement, the prisoners declared themselves still interested in talking to her. They made a tentative plan: the men would call Trenticosta; Sullivan would be in the room as well. “Even though they can control who that phone [call] goes out to, they can’t control who’s sitting on the other [end of the] line,” Sullivan says.

Although recording a phone conversation for a radio story was not optimal because of reduced sound quality, it was a lot better than nothing. If Sullivan were able to interview the inmates, she could ask the questions she felt were central to the story: Were you framed during the investigation? Did you kill the guard? What has it been like to be in solitary all these years? “That’s a giant gaping hole to not have represented in the story,” Sullivan says.

But while Sullivan could interview the inmates, she was not sure she should . “I don’t think they fully understood all the repercussions of it,” she said. She met with Drummond to discuss the quandary. Like most news organizations, NPR News adhered to a code of ethics and practices. “The purpose of this code is to protect the credibility of NPR’s programming by ensuring high standards of honesty, integrity, impartiality, and staff conduct,” it said. [1] The section on ethical conduct in news coverage and program production included the stipulation that journalists “always keep in mind that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort, and they weigh that against the importance of the story.”

Was this the kind of situation the code was written to address? Should Sullivan put first her desire to tell the best story she could and let the chips fall where they might? Should she feel responsible if the prisoners were indeed returned to solitary confinement? Should she simply include the prison’s threat in her report, and hope they were bluffing? How strong a story could she tell without a contribution from the inmates? Most pressing, should Sullivan tell Trenticosta to arrange a phone conversation with the prisoners?