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Virginian-Pilot editorial: Judge's initiative invites mistrust |
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Judge's initiative invites mistrust
Posted to: Editorials Opinion
http://hamptonroads.com/2008/04/judges-initiative-invites-mistrust
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The Virginian-Pilot
© April 23, 2008
IMAGINE ENROLLING your child at a day care center after finding no evidence that the owner had been anything but a responsible, watchful caretaker.
Imagine learning, after your child wandered off the playground, that two years earlier a jury had found the owner negligent in supervising kids, but because the case was on appeal, that record wasn't public.
Most people would be incensed at such secrecy, and rightly so. But that's essentially the process the chief justice of Virginia's Supreme Court wants for lawyers being disciplined for breaking the rules.
If the State Bar admonishes or reprimands a lawyer, or suspends or revokes his license, Chief Justice Leroy Hassell doesn't want it publicized until the Supreme Court has upheld the finding or the appeals period has expired. This is an odd retreat after years of incremental, but steady, progress making our legal process more open to scrutiny.
Under Hassell's recommendation, if you wanted to find out, for example, whether the court had disciplined a lawyer you were considering hiring to handle a parent's estate, you might be out of luck. If the lawyer had just been reprimanded for misconduct, Hassell wants him to be able to go through the appeals process before the disciplinary action hurts his reputation.
Howard Martin, a Norfolk lawyer and president of the Virginia State Bar, wrote Hassell this month, politely but firmly objecting to closing out the public. "The extent of openness in the current disciplinary system is consistent with that which is characteristic of the court system generally," he said. "It is also consistent with the idea of increased transparency in government and in the disciplinary process."
Virginians' inability to find out from the Web site discipline information during the appeal process "significantly impairs the bar's important efforts to protect the public," Martin wrote, adding that it is "in stark contrast to the court system's treatment of the ordinary litigant or defendant."
Out of respect for the chief justice, the bar has disabled its lawyer discipline search function on the Web site and discontinued posting disciplinary cases on its hearing docket. Fortunately, if someone calls the bar to ask about the disciplinary record of a particular lawyer, the bar still will say what actions, if any, have been leveled against the lawyer.
The bar's standing committee on lawyer discipline has urged the Supreme Court to allow public access to continue. The Internet is "an essential tool of public protection, and that information should be available" as soon as a lawyer is found to have violated disciplinary rules, the committee wrote in a resolution.
The bar is right to defend the importance of transparency, even though it may bring disrepute on some of its members.
It's hard to trust the justice system if the officers of the court are held to a different standard from the one used for the people they were hired to represent.
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Va. Lawyers Weekly article on online disciplinary info |
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Court: Delay Web discipline postings
Bar cites 2001 rules about transparency
By Alan Cooper
April 21, 2008
http://www.valawyersweekly.com/weeklyedition/2008/04/21/court-delay-web-discipline-postings/
The Supreme Court of Virginia has told the Virginia State Bar that the bar should not post disciplinary information about a lawyer on its Web site until the time for filing any appeal has expired.
But the VSB has responded that the restriction on Web site postings is inconsistent with 2001 rule changes that made the VSB’s disciplinary process more transparent.
In a letter last week to Chief Justice Leroy Rountree Hassell Sr., VSB President Howard W. Martin Jr. asked the court to reconsider the restriction.
Hassell wrote a letter last month to Martin addressing several VSB matters of interest to the court.
One was unexpected. “The Justices have decided that the Virginia State Bar should not post any information about disciplinary complaints filed against lawyers on the Virginia State Bar’s website until a decision has been made ad-verse to the lawyer and the time for filing an appeal from that decision has expired,” Hassell wrote.
If the lawyer appeals, the matter should not appear on the Web site until the Supreme Court issues a mandate or order, Hassell said. “The Supreme Court would like this policy implemented immediately.”
At a meeting of the VSB’s executive committee earlier this month, Martin said, “This creates some issues for us.” Martin said then that he understood the action was in response to a complaint by an attorney who had a disciplinary citation dismissed on appeal.
In a letter to Hassell dated April 11, Martin elaborated on those issues. The 2001 rules specify that a charge of misconduct becomes public once a finding of probable cause of a violation of legal ethics is made. The VSB maintains a docket of cases pending before a district disciplinary committee, the disciplinary board or a three-judge panel.
Because that docket is public information, it is posted on the VSB Web site, Martin said. In addition, the clerk of the disciplinary system responds to inquiries from the press and public about the nature of such charges.
Once a matter is on the public docket, the clerk tracks all subsequent procedural developments on the Web site, including appeals, stays, reversals and dismissals.
“This procedure has been very popular with the public and the press,” Martin said. “It, along with the disciplinary record search, is the primary source for public information about disciplinary actions.”
The rules require the clerk to issue press releases “summarizing each public Admonition, Public Reprimand, Suspen-sion or Revocation,” Martin wrote. The clerk typically does not issue them in the case of admonitions or public reprimands until the time for an appeal expires or the sanction is upheld.
However, because there is no provision for an automatic stay from a suspension and a stay cannot be granted for a revocation, the clerk issues press releases in those cases immediately. Martin contended that the clerk should be able to continue to promptly issue the suspension and revocation releases and place the information on the Web site because the rules also require the clerk to notify the courts where the defendant practices of the suspension or revocation.
“[T]he failure to publicize such information could lead to the anomalous result of an attorney being suspended for a year, appealing his sanction, and by the time the appeal is resolved and the sanction affirmed, the time of suspension would have been served,” Martin wrote. “The fact that the public would have been unaware of the attorney’s status during this time frame would be problematic.”
He added, “The rules of the Court mandate a public process for the serious offenders. We believe the inability of Virginians to readily ascertain the discipline information via the bar’s website during the appeal process significantly impairs the bar’s important efforts to protect the public. Finally, such deference to the respondent lawyer is in stark contrast to the court system’s treatment of the ordinary litigant or defendant.”
Forrest M. Landon, the former executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government and a lay member of the VSB’s Committee on Lawyer Discipline said, he was disappointed at the directive “to change what has been a good transparency effort over the years.
“The court, if it thinks it through clearly,” should reverse its position, he said.
“If self-regulation is going to continue, there’s got to be trust in the system,” and that trust can only come from an open system once probable cause of an ethical violation has been established, he said. He noted that most complaints are thrown out through the bar’s confidential intake and district subcommittee procedures, so that only misconduct allegations with some merit are ever made public.
Megan Rhyne, associate director of the coalition, said, “We are concerned any time records and information previously available to the public, whether in paper form or over the Internet, are suddenly and without notice removed from public view.
“The justices are perhaps concerned that a bell can’t be unrung: that a lawyer found to be innocent of any wrongdoing will nonetheless suffer because information about an unfounded complaint was already publicized. But we believe the justices’ order is too broad in calling for ‘any information’ to be pulled from the bar’s Web site,” she said.
“The public - and other attorneys (including those from out of state) who may need to rely on a local counsel - deserve a comprehensive and accessible resource to research the background of the attorneys they may retain,” Rhyne continued. “We applaud the bar’s efforts so far, as noted in Martin’s letter, to make the lawyer disciplinary system more transparent and would like to see this trend continue, rather than move backward.”
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State bar president has questions on Va. Supreme Court chief justice's order |
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Letter from State Bar president Howard Martin to Supreme Court Chief Justice Leroy Hassell asking for clarification on certain points related to Hassell's request that the bar immediately stop posting adverse disciplinary results until the appeal time has expired. Virginia Lawyers Weekly article and Virginian-Pilot editorial.
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Washington Examiner: News media should press presidential candidates on open govt |
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http://www.examiner.com/printa-1287016~AP_CEO_Pushes_for_More_Open_Government.html
Politics
AP CEO Pushes for More Open Government
By HOPE YEN, The Associated Press
2008-03-19 01:32:40.0
Current rank: # 4,675 of 9,698
WASHINGTON -
At a time of continued government secrecy, the news media should press the presidential candidates on whether their administration would enforce "the spirit as well as the letter of the law" protecting the public's right to know, Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley said Tuesday.
"Secrecy is one of the handiest tools for government that wants to be accountable only to itself regardless of the spirit of any law," he said in a National Sunshine Week speech.
Curley praised congressional passage of legislation that toughened the Freedom of Information Act. But he chided Bush administration efforts that he said undercut the measure.
The presidential election provides a good opportunity to press for open government policies, he said.
"We need to ask the candidates - at every opportunity until we have a clear answer - whether they are willing to appoint an attorney general willing to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the law that protects the people's right to know what their government is doing," Curley said in his speech Tuesday night at the National Press Club.
President Bush signed into law last December a toughened version of the Freedom of Information Act, the first such makeover to public access laws in a decade. It establishes a hot line service for all federal agencies to deal with problems and an ombudsman to provide an alternative to litigation in disclosure disputes.
The legislation came partly in response to an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security. Although the legislation is aimed at reversing Ashcroft's order, it fails to explicitly do so.
Earlier this year, the administration submitted a budget proposal that would move the ombudsman's office to the Justice Department instead of the National Archives. Open government advocates including Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., say that would be a conflict of interest because Justice would be defending federal agencies seeking to keep records secret.
In his speech, Curley criticized the administration move as a "sucker punch" to cripple the new FOIA law. He urged advocates to push back and called for the next attorney general to explicitly reverse the Ashcroft memo.
"We must do more because the entrenched powers have become far more determined to avoid public scrutiny when it matters most," he said.
Addressing the issue of whether journalists should be open government advocates, Curley said it would be a disservice to the public to pretend to be "disinterested observers." He noted that journalists already routinely badgered executive agencies and courts "for information and access we think the Constitution says the public is supposed to have."
"The brightest rays from Sunshine Weeks have spotlighted countless efforts by citizens to hold their governments accountable," Curley added. "By reporting on their efforts, we have revealed for millions important lessons in fighting city halls, statehouses and, yes, even Washington."
In his remarks, Curley:
-Cited the case of former USA Today reporter Toni Locy as a "dramatic example" of why Congress should pass a federal shield law. Locy recently was fined up to $5,000 a day by a federal judge unless she disclosed anonymous Justice Department sources to lawyers for a former Army scientist who came under scrutiny in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Locy also at one time worked for the AP.
-Urged release of any evidence the U.S. military has to justify its detention of AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who worked in the Iraq war zone. After Hussein spent 19 months in prison, his case was referred to the Iraqi criminal courts last year. Pentagon spokesmen have alleged that Hussein was suspected in a range of terrorist-related activities.
Curley said he thought the Locy case had gotten good public attention. On Hussein, he said, "I don't know how many people are interested in one more Iraqi. I wish there were."
- Predicted the media would not shy away from reporting about the human rights abuses or protests in China during the Summer Olympic Games. He noted that one journalist across the world is beaten every two weeks in pursuit of the news.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Bristol Herald Courier: News partners launch second salaries project |
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News Partners Launch Second Salaries Project
http://www.tricities.com/tristate/tri/news.PrintView.-content-articles-TRI-2008-03-18-0006.html
Tuesday, Mar 18, 2008 - 12:00 AM Updated: 08:32 AM
By Bristol Herald Courier Staff Reports
E-mail
Sunday kicked off Sunshine Week across the United States. It’s an annual effort to educate the public about the need for open government and freedom of information.
In honor of the fourth annual event, the Bristol Herald Courier, TriCities.com and News Channel 11 will work to stress the importance of open government. The centerpiece of that effort will be Phase II of our online salaries project.
In December, the Herald Courier posted online the salaries of public officials in 65 cities, towns, counties and school systems, including Bristol, Johnson City, Kingsport and locales across Southwest Virginia.
Residents in overwhelming numbers across the rest of Northeast Tennessee jumped on the bandwagon and requested the data from their locales.
For the past 10 weeks, TriCities.com has gathered the additional salaries and will post that data online starting today. Visit the database here.
This is public information that will help taxpayers gauge whether their public officials earn too much or too little, and whether disparities exist across town and county borders.
It also will help local governments compare their pay with neighbors to ensure their workers are getting a fair shake.
“We are a government of the people, by the people and for the people,” said Frank Gibson, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government.
TCOG is a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping government open and notes that the names, positions and salaries of public employees must be released under state law.
“We’ve found cases where public employees have gotten twice as much in overtime as their salary,” Gibson said. “So to protect the public from abuse and wasteful spending, the information should be available to the public.”
In this second round of data gathering, TriCities.com collected salaries from 25 of the 26 agencies petitioned. Only Greene County has not complied, but efforts – including possible legal action – will continue to ensure those records are turned over to the public.
“With all due respect, I can’t see this as doing anything other than stirring up trouble, to be frank with you,” said Greene County Mayor Alan Broyles.
Broyles and county Budget Director David Lawing have been balking since they were petitioned in early January for the public records.
The following Tennessee jurisdictions have complied with state law and turned over salary data and are included in Phase II of the online database: Washington County government and schools; the town of Jonesborough; Greene County schools; the city of Greeneville and its school system; Unicoi County government and schools; the towns of Unicoi and Erwin; Carter County government and schools; the city of Elizabethton and its school system; Hawkins County government and schools; the town of Rogersville and its schools; Johnson County government and schools; the town of Mountain City; Greeneville Light and Power; Johnson City Power Board; Erwin Utilities and Elizabethton Electric.
Any jurisdictions overlooked or out of compliance with state law will be added to the database as soon as possible.
Nate Morabito of News Channel 11, J. Todd Foster of the Bristol Herald Courier and Christine Riser of TriCities.com reported this story.
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