Richard N. Winfield, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who worked to protect press freedoms as the longtime general counsel for The Associated Press and who later organized volunteer lawyers to promote free expression and human rights around the world, died on Oct. 22 in Manhattan. He was 91.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by head injuries incurred when he fell on Oct. 7, his daughter Nicole Winfield said.
As The A.P.’s chief lawyer for three decades and as counsel for other media organizations, Mr. Winfield honed a legal strategy to protect reporters’ confidential sources and unpublished notes, challenged efforts to close court proceedings to the press, persuaded judges to allow camera in courtrooms, and insulated newspapers from libel suits if they reprinted articles supplied by wire services like The A.P., a news cooperative.
Broadening the reach of freedom of information acts, during the 2004 presidential campaign he guided A.P. reporters in gaining access to the Vietnam-era military records of both President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee. At issue were whether Mr. Bush had fulfilled his service requirements and whether Mr. Kerry had recalled his combat experience accurately.
In 2000, after he retired from the law firm Rogers & Wells in Manhattan, Mr. Winfield helped found the International Senior Lawyers Project, which organizes volunteer lawyers to promote free expression, court reform and accountability, and protects journalists against government suppression and heavy-handed judicial constraints.
A report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2021 cited the project’s intervention on behalf of Issa Amro, described as a Palestinian human rights defender who was tried for “disturbing public order, hate speech, and insult” before an Israeli military court and a magistrate’s court in the West Bank city of Hebron.
“Providing in-depth legal arguments drawn from international human rights law,” the UNESCO report said, the intervention gave the campaign for Mr. Amro’s release “legitimacy and argued that the proceedings were politically motivated.”
In 2019, Mr. Winfield personally observed the appeals trial in Casablanca, Morocco, of 43 people convicted in connection with mass demonstrations in 2016 and 2017. He later described the judicial process as a “show trial” that was “devoid of any semblance of impartiality.”
He reported to the European Parliament that a Moroccan journalist and other defendants had confessed only after they were tortured. He also concluded that defense lawyers had been muzzled by the judges.
When Mr. Winfield retired from the lawyers project in 2023, its media law working group was named “The Winfield Freedom of Expression Initiative.” He also served as chairman of the World Press Freedom Committee. In 2002, he received the First Amendment Award from the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
“When we would ask Dick, as our lawyer, to review a sensitive piece of copy, his first words were often some form of ‘What a great story!’” Louis D. Boccardi, the former president and chief executive of The A.P., was quoted as saying in the agency’s obituary about Mr. Winfield. “And then we would go through the story, not to weaken it but to strengthen it against whatever reaction it might bring. He understood the newsroom and appreciated the dedication and the care that had gone into the work.”
Mr. Boccardi later wrote in an email, “I often thought that if the law hadn’t called him for a career, he would have made a wonderful reporter.”
Richard Neill Winfield was born on Jan. 20, 1933, in Chicago. His father, Richard Paul Winfield, was the food and beverage comptroller at the Pier Sixty-Six resort in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His mother, Mary Bertrand (Monaghan) Winfield, was a kindergarten teacher.
He grew up in Valley Stream, N.Y., on Long Island, and graduated from Villanova University with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1955. He was editor of the campus newspaper and had considered a journalism career but was persuaded by one of the Augustinian priests at that Roman Catholic university to enroll in law school instead.
Mr. Winfield was a lieutenant in the Navy from 1955 to 1958, teaching European and U.S. diplomatic history at the Naval Academy. He graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1961.
He went on to work for the Manhattan firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine and to serve as an assistant counsel to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York from 1965 to 1967. He then returned from Albany to join Rogers & Wells.
Mr. Winfield began representing The Associated Press when William P. Rogers, a founder of the firm, was named secretary of state under President Richard M. Nixon in 1969. (The firm later merged with the international firm Clifford Chance, and was renamed Clifford Chance US.)
Mr. Rogers, his mentor, was among the lawyers who successfully argued a landmark First Amendment case, The New York Times v. Sullivan, before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court ruled in 1964 that for a public official to sustain a claim of defamation or libel against a news organization, the official had to prove actual malice — that journalists knew that a statement was false or were reckless in deciding to publish the information without investigating whether it was accurate.
Mr. Winfield taught media law classes at the Brooklyn Law School and at the Columbia and Fordham law schools in Manhattan.
In addition to his daughter Nicole, a correspondent for The A.P. based in Rome, he is survived by his wife, Deborah Mary (Trainer) Winfield, whom he married in 1959; another daughter, Pamela Winfield; a son, Richard Jr.; a sister, Denise Mack; and seven grandchildren.
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