Three University of Denver law students who represented a federal prisoner fighting for the right to publish articles from prison won their case against the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger ruled that the prison byline regulations prohibiting prisoners from writing stories for the news media violated the First Amendment rights of prisoners and the press.

DU law professor Laura Lee Rovner, who oversaw the students' work, could not be reached Thursday evening for comment about the ruling. Donald Bounds, Jack Hobaugh and Michelle Young worked on the case for a year.

They represented Mark Jordan, a prisoner at Supermax, the ultra-high-security prison in Florence where many of the nation's most notorious are held, including Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

Jordan was convicted of bank robbery, and in 1999 he stabbed an inmate to death at the adjacent U.S. Penitentiary in Florence. He is scheduled to serve another 41 years behind bars.

Jordan had published several stories on prison life in Off!, a New York publication.

He was punished by prison officials in 2001 for publishing under a byline.

Krieger's ruling is not exclusive to Jordan. It says that the Federal Bureau of Prisons may not punish any inmate who decides to publish under a byline.

The government argued that inmates who act as reporters or publish under a byline could rise to undue prominence within the inmate population, thereby becoming a security risk. Also, the government was concerned that inmates could make a business out of it.

"No historical evidence that any inmate's publications in the news media created such security problems were presented," Krieger wrote in her ruling