Transparency News 10/23/17
Monday, October 23, 2017
State and Local Stories
State and Local Stories
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Arlington Public Schools has been awarded the Meritorious Budget Award for the ninth year in a row from the Association of School Business Officials. The school district is one of 16 across the commonwealth to receive the award, based on its budget process for the 2016-17 school year. Award-winning school districts are those that are “setting a high standard for transparent budget development,” the 30,000-member association said.
InsideNoVa
National Stories
The U.S. Justice Department has refused to release a report on the North Charleston Police Department after the shooting death of an unarmed black man by a white officer in South Carolina. The federal agency said it was holding onto the material because of its "commitment to respecting local law enforcement," The Post and Courier of Charleston reported. The newspaper filed an open records request for the report sought by North Charleston officials after the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott.
McClatchy
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that, subject to receipt of further information, he planned to allow the opening of long-secret files on the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy that are scheduled for release next week. Politico magazine earlier quoted Trump administration and other U.S. government officials as saying the president would almost certainly block the release of information from some of the thousands of classified files, which the U.S. National Archives is due to make public by an Oct. 26 deadline. Over the years, the National Archives has released most documents related to the case, but a final batch remains and only Trump has the authority to decide whether some should continue to be withheld or released in redacted form.
Reuters
The Oregon Supreme Court has denied a request by The Oregonian Publishing Co. for Oregon Health and Science University to release the names of patients who intend to sue. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports the court ruled on Thursday that the information is protected from public disclosure under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The company that publishes the Portland newspaper in 2011 sought a list of names of those who planned to sue the university, which is a public institution that receives taxpayer money. The list would have included patients, students, employees, contractors and visitors.
McClatchy
Texas Rangers co-chairman Bob Simpson is getting a divorce from Janice Simpson, his wife of 19 years. But you won’t find a record of it by searching digital court records at the Tarrant County district clerk’s office. The same goes for the divorce of former Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton and his wife, Katie, even though it was widely reported in 2015. And a search for records of Van Cliburn Competition winner Vadym Kholodenko’s divorce from his wife, Sofya Tsygankova, turns up nothing, even though it was widely reported when she was arrested for killing their children in 2016. A Star-Telegram investigation found a number of cases that cannot be accessed through the county’s computer system. The documents for about a half-dozen cases the Star-Telegram researched don’t appear, raising concerns about whether the public can actually find all the open records in Tarrant County’s family courts.
WFAA
A federal judge last week unsealed the source code for a software program developed by New York City’s crime lab, exposing to public scrutiny a disputed technique for analyzing complex DNA evidence. Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York lifted a protective order in response to a motion by ProPublica, which argued that there was a public interest in disclosing the code. ProPublica has obtained the source code, known as the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST, and published it on GitHub; two newly unredacted defense expert affidavits are also available.
ProPublica
Editorials/Columns
Charlottesville activists ought to take their campaign to Richmond. Let’s see how Gov. Terry McAuliffe and his crew like it when meetings are interrupted by protesters accusing officials of having blood on their hands for not responding more effectively to racist rallies. Oh … that’s right. Activists can’t interrupt state meetings because the governor’s task force on civil unrest won’t even tell us when and where the meetings are held. We’re not advocating for civil unrest at these meetings. But we do want to make a point about government transparency.
Daily Progress
Arlington Public Schools has been awarded the Meritorious Budget Award for the ninth year in a row from the Association of School Business Officials. The school district is one of 16 across the commonwealth to receive the award, based on its budget process for the 2016-17 school year. Award-winning school districts are those that are “setting a high standard for transparent budget development,” the 30,000-member association said.
InsideNoVa
National Stories
The U.S. Justice Department has refused to release a report on the North Charleston Police Department after the shooting death of an unarmed black man by a white officer in South Carolina. The federal agency said it was holding onto the material because of its "commitment to respecting local law enforcement," The Post and Courier of Charleston reported. The newspaper filed an open records request for the report sought by North Charleston officials after the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott.
McClatchy
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that, subject to receipt of further information, he planned to allow the opening of long-secret files on the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy that are scheduled for release next week. Politico magazine earlier quoted Trump administration and other U.S. government officials as saying the president would almost certainly block the release of information from some of the thousands of classified files, which the U.S. National Archives is due to make public by an Oct. 26 deadline. Over the years, the National Archives has released most documents related to the case, but a final batch remains and only Trump has the authority to decide whether some should continue to be withheld or released in redacted form.
Reuters
The Oregon Supreme Court has denied a request by The Oregonian Publishing Co. for Oregon Health and Science University to release the names of patients who intend to sue. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports the court ruled on Thursday that the information is protected from public disclosure under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The company that publishes the Portland newspaper in 2011 sought a list of names of those who planned to sue the university, which is a public institution that receives taxpayer money. The list would have included patients, students, employees, contractors and visitors.
McClatchy
Texas Rangers co-chairman Bob Simpson is getting a divorce from Janice Simpson, his wife of 19 years. But you won’t find a record of it by searching digital court records at the Tarrant County district clerk’s office. The same goes for the divorce of former Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton and his wife, Katie, even though it was widely reported in 2015. And a search for records of Van Cliburn Competition winner Vadym Kholodenko’s divorce from his wife, Sofya Tsygankova, turns up nothing, even though it was widely reported when she was arrested for killing their children in 2016. A Star-Telegram investigation found a number of cases that cannot be accessed through the county’s computer system. The documents for about a half-dozen cases the Star-Telegram researched don’t appear, raising concerns about whether the public can actually find all the open records in Tarrant County’s family courts.
WFAA
A federal judge last week unsealed the source code for a software program developed by New York City’s crime lab, exposing to public scrutiny a disputed technique for analyzing complex DNA evidence. Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York lifted a protective order in response to a motion by ProPublica, which argued that there was a public interest in disclosing the code. ProPublica has obtained the source code, known as the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST, and published it on GitHub; two newly unredacted defense expert affidavits are also available.
ProPublica
Editorials/Columns
Charlottesville activists ought to take their campaign to Richmond. Let’s see how Gov. Terry McAuliffe and his crew like it when meetings are interrupted by protesters accusing officials of having blood on their hands for not responding more effectively to racist rallies. Oh … that’s right. Activists can’t interrupt state meetings because the governor’s task force on civil unrest won’t even tell us when and where the meetings are held. We’re not advocating for civil unrest at these meetings. But we do want to make a point about government transparency.
Daily Progress
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