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Current Headlines
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Lawsuits filed against Roanoke Sheriff and Radford City Council |
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Two FOIA lawsuits were filed the last week in September by two Roanoke media outlets.
The first suit, filed by The Roanoke Times and Roanoke TV station WSLS, is against Roanoke Sheriff Octavia Johnson over her office's policy on releasing mug shots. The policy does not allow the release of photos for people who have been arrested but released on bail. The Times and WSLS argue that mug shots must be released under FOIA -- regardless of bail status -- and that photos may be withheld only if they will jeopardize an ongoing investigation (once the danger has passed, they should be released, says the FOIA handbook published by the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police).
Read about the mug shot case here.
The media outlets also point out the unfairness of the sheriff's policy in that the wealthier defendants who can afford to post bail can effectively escape public notice, but not poorer defendants.
The second suit was filed by The Roanoke Times against the City of Radford over FOIA requests themselves. The paper asked for FOIA requests received by the city over a 3-month period. Two documents turned over in the request were heavily redacted, and the paper is now challenging those redactions.
Read about the FOIA request suit here.
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Va. Supreme Court: anti-spam law trashed |
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The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday, Sept. 12, overturned the conviction of a notorious AOL spammer, the first spamming defendant in the country to be convicted of a felony, saying the state junk e-mail law is too broad and violates the First Amendment. Read more on the Iconoclast Blog.
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Va. Supreme Court: wrongful death settlements public |
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From the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star:
The settlement terms of several wrongful death lawsuits brought in Spotsylvania County against a pharmaceutical company must be disclosed publicly and cannot be sealed in the court records, a Virginia Supreme Court ruled [Friday, Sept. 12].
The unanimous opinion upholds a circuit court ruling that it was improper to permit the suits to be settled without the details disclosed in court.
The deaths occurred at Mary Washington Hospital 2004 and 2005 and the defendants in the case were B. Braun Medical Inc. and its subsidiary, Central Admixture Pharmacy Services (CAPS). After the cases were settled with the settlement terms filed in the court records, The Free Lance-Star and the Richmond Times-Dispatch intervened and, after hearings, a circuit judge ruled that the terms of the settlements must be filed in the court clerks office. The judge agreed to seal the settlements until the Supreme Court decided the appeals.
The opinion was written by Justice Lawrence Koontz.
Malpractice lawsuits were brought by Sue Carol Perreault, Phyllis Ann Mulholland, Sue Ella C. Musselman, and Dona J. Holt on behalf of family members who died as a result of the administration during open-heart surgery of an improperly formulated or contaminated cardioplegic solution manufactured and distributed by CAPS.
Read the opinion on the Supreme Court's Web site: http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/opnscvwp/1071978.pdf
or on the VCOG Web site: http://www.opengovva.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1130
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Daily Press: Be a watchdog |
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Daily Press editorial
July 20, 2008
Be a watchdog
How to keep government clean: Keep an eye on it
The debacle in Gloucester County is a vivid example of why we have, and need, open government laws and how those laws benefit citizens who are willing to be their own watchdogs. And, with all modesty, why an independent press, keeping an eye on government, is an essential part of our system of government.
Last week, a special grand jury indicted four members of the Gloucester Board of Supervisors Teresa Altemus, Michelle Ressler, Bobby Crewe and Gregory Woodard for, among other things, conducting public business in secret. According to the grand jury's report, they schemed, behind the scenes, to dump the county administrator and replace him with a friend of Altemus, to figure out how much to pay the replacement and when he could start work. And they did it in private homes and small groups, where the public couldn't see what they were up to.
At the board's first meeting of the year, at which their cabal officially took power, they dropped their fully formed bombshell.
It exploded.
Citizens were incensed. They packed meetings and voiced their anger and indignation. They extracted a dubious apology from Altemus, a sincere apology from a fifth supervisor, Buddy Rilee, who had let himself be dragged in.
Woodard accused them of acting like a mob. Actually, they were acting like the kind of citizens representative democracy requires: watchful, skeptical, demanding and involved.
The citizens were aided by the don't-back-down reporting of the Daily Press' Matt Sabo, and by a couple of technological assets to civic participation: the videotaping of supervisors meetings, and the Daily Press Web site, www.dailypress.com, where Sabo's blog and the public comment sections offered a running source of information and a forum for citizen commentary.
But even the most watchful and skeptical citizens can be stymied when government is allowed to work in the shadows. Modern technology is useful, but it's hardly a match for these oldest of human failings: an appetite for power, an inclination to vindictiveness, pettiness, arrogance and self-aggrandizement, all of which the indicted supervisors displayed.
They wouldn't be facing a day in court next week if there weren't laws against working in secret. Not so many years ago, there weren't, and the public's business was even more routinely done where the public wasn't admitted, in back rooms. With certain exceptions, at least that's not legal these days, even if it's all too common.
Too often, elected representatives and some appointed officials at the local, state and federal level defy the spirit of Freedom of Information laws, twisting logic into knots to find legal cover to retreat behind closed doors. Since neither the public nor the press can observe these sessions, it's hard to tell how often the law is broken. But there are telltales that it sometimes is, by governing boards, and groups of officials and others who know better.
In addition, government bodies routinely go into private session when the law allows it, but doesn't require it, such as when they're picking appointments to public commissions. Their "default" position is secrecy, not openness.
Worse, they skirt the law by meeting two by two, because meetings of three or more officials have to be open. Or they move what should be public decision-making into semi-private settings, by using private partnerships or unelected funding authorities to direct commercial development.
Or they cave in to the influence of special interests and carve out exemptions to what are considered public documents or the work of public licensing or regulatory agencies. For example, the state Board of Medicine shields consumer complaints about doctors far beyond the point of weeding out the purely gratuitous, so the public is left in the dark when there are legitimate questions about dangerous doctors. And now the Virginia Supreme Court has decided that that we-won't-tell-you-till-it's-all-over approach will be used on complaints about lawyers, too.
The inclination to hide is alive and well, in other words, and the state Freedom of Information Act is whittled away a little in practically every session of the legislature. The House of Delegates itself took a step backward when it decided that subcommittees could kill bills with no recorded votes a process that works against citizens in two ways. It magnifies the influence of paid lobbyists whose business it is to be at every one of those subcommittee meetings, and the lack of a recorded vote means citizens can't even hold their elected representatives accountable.
Some governmental bodies show enthusiasm for the principle of openness; some don't. Some make it easy to watch videos of meetings not just of the city council or board of supervisors but also, in some places, of other key groups, such as planning commissions by putting them on their Web sites and cable channels. The more, the better.
And what's the role of the press? Freedom of information laws are for the public, not just the press. But because the press employs reporters and editors whose job is keeping an eye on government, it's often the press that demands access to meetings and documents and shares what it learns with the public. It's often the press that files a legal challenge when open government laws are abused, or just pours ink on the issue so citizens see the secrecy, if not the secrets. That often opens the doors.
Plenty of private citizens are on regular duty, too. Some demand action in response to particular events, as the Gloucester Rotary Club did after the supervisors dropped that bomb on Jan. 2. Some show up at every meeting of their city council or board of supervisors, as gadflies in every locality who ask questions that need to be asked. Some get a grip on a particular concern, and won't let go such as the couple who blew the top off state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries board and staff members helping themselves to taxpayer dollars for luxuries, and a safari.
Openness. Involvement. Accountability. That's how representative government is supposed to work.
And, as the Gloucester example shows, it's invigorating when it does.
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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
Read Articles
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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