Approximately 24 hours before I nervously walked through the intimidating doors of the Medical Sciences auditorium to take the LSAT exam Oct. 1, another woman was rejoicing as she walked out the doors of Alexandria Detention Center and bade her prison days farewell. That woman is none other than Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who finally testified last Friday before a federal grand jury after spending 12 weeks in jail for declining to name her source.

Now Miller’s case is kind of complicated. Miller’s source, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, said he freed her from her obligation to keep their conversations secret a year ago. However, Miller was unconvinced until he made a personal telephone call to her on Sept. 19 in her cell, leading to her subsequent release.

The reason journalists give sources so much significance is because people don’t have to talk to them, and they often don’t want to. If they talk, they are doing it to help reporters get a story straight or see their names in the paper. And on the occasion that they talk confidentially, it is a reporter’s responsibility to value that secrecy. No source would reveal valuable information to a reporter that he or she considers untrustworthy. If a source provides crucial information with the promise of confidentiality, and the reporter reneges on that promise, no other sources will ever trust the reporter or paper that the reporter works for. It is simply “do or die”; spend some time in prison or lose your credibility as a journalist. And in the field of journalism, credibility is all we own. So, the choice is clear.

So then, what is Miller’s explanation? If she was unclear about Libby’s intentions about releasing her from the confidentiality agreement, then going to prison to protect him was noble. A veteran reporter once said to me, “I would love to go to jail for a source. There is enough dirt going around; I could uncover a Watergate with the amount of sources that would trust me then.”

Did Miller want to prove to her sources that she can keep a secret? Or, more importantly, was she protecting herself in some way? Dan Froomkin, in his Sept. 30 column for Washingtonpost.com, said that the less charitable explanation is that “going to jail was Miller’s way of transforming herself from a journalistic outcast (based on her gullible pre-war reporting) into a much-celebrated hero of press freedom.”

But we must remember that her endorsement of the presence of weapons of mass destruction, though seen as career suicide by critics, should not take away from her exemplary behavior. For better or worse, she stood up for what she believed and continues to do so.

To give her the benefit of doubt, and I earnestly believe, that maybe Miller was unsure about Libby’s liberation of her duty or maybe she just saw her jail time as an opportunity to further the name of journalism in the world. In that she did succeed. Journalism, both television and print, has gotten a bad rap in the past decade, only slightly mitigated by Miller’s honorable commitment to ethics.

Maybe we needed a Judith Miller to show us that not all journalists are selling out, making stories up and asserting their own political agenda. So, rather than speculate and denigrate her confusion about whether she had permission from Libby to testify, I would rather laud her as a symbol for what pure journalism should stand for. Sources are meant to be kept private to enhance our sincerity as seekers of truth. If we as journalists write stories for the public, we are accountable for them. If we make a mistake, we run a correction. And if we use an unidentified source, we should be willing to go to jail to protect them. It is how the business works. Miller ought to be exalted for her principles, at the very least.