Transparency News, 8/27/21

The Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot are appealing to the Virginia Supreme Court after a trial judge closed an April bond hearing for a Newport News police officer charged with murder. The newspapers contend that Circuit Court Judge Margaret Poles Spencer erred in barring the media and public from the hearing for Police Sgt. Albin “Trevor” Pearson, and also incorrect in sealing documents related to it. The appeal maintains that court hearings — including bond hearings — and related judicial records are presumed open under the First Amendment and other provisions, and exceptions are allowed only in extremely limited circumstances.
The Virginian-Pilot (includes link to the full filing)

According to court papers filed by James Madison University, it was not tracking COVID numbers in any kind of database during the largest peak of positive COVID-19 cases on campus at the start of the fall 2020 semester. That information came to light during a hearing between Jake Conley, editor-in-chief of The Breeze and an attorney representing JMU in Rockingham County Circuit Court on Thursday morning. (Over the summer, Conley also contributed to The Citizen.) Conley, who sued the university on behalf of the campus newspaper, was asking that JMU provide The Breeze with COVID-19 data in response to a FOIA request filed last year. An affidavit filed as part of JMU’s response from the Director of the Office of Residence Life stated that during the time between August 17 and September 16, 2020, notifications of positive tests of students living in dorms were done via phone call and recorded into the students individual education records.
Harrisonburg Citizen
Read the full filing here

 

In five weeks the Supreme Court will return from its summer break to hear a batch of new disputes, including clashes over abortion and guns. After scrutinising briefs from litigants and amici curiae (friends of the court), the justices will hear oral argument in these cases and—weeks or months later—release opinions explaining why one party won and the other lost. But this methodically adjudicated “merits docket” represents a shrinking proportion of the Supreme Court’s notable business. Although the justices handle about five dozen cases this way each year (down from more than 150 in the 1980s), they dispatch thousands of other legal tangles without fanfare—and often with scant explanation. The so-called “shadow docket” (a term coined in 2015 by Will Baude of the University of Chicago) includes emergency appeals from parties who believe they would be irreparably harmed without quick intervention from the justices.
The Economist