A measure declaring that emails and text messages sent on Kentucky public officials’ privately owned devices are not public records was approved by a Senate committee Wednesday, setting off alarms among advocates for government transparency. The provision was tacked on to House Bill 302 (a bill dealing with reorganization within the state Public Protection Cabinet) on Wednesday by the Senate State and Local Government Committee on a motion from Senate Majority Leader Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown.
Courier-Journal
The Los Angeles Times has sued L.A. County, accusing it of repeatedly and routinely flouting laws designed to ensure government transparency. Over the last year alone, county officials have refused to release information about the status of homicide investigations, allegations of sexual misconduct against prosecutors and even mundane information such as email addresses for Sheriff’s Department employees, the lawsuit says. County officials also ignored a request for copies of two instruction manuals coaching employees on how to respond to such requests, according to the lawsuit. One of the manuals is titled “California Public Records Act ‘Emergency Kit’ for County Counsel.”
Los Angeles Times
THERE’S NO SUCH thing as the US criminal justice system. There are, instead, thousands of counties across the country, each with their own systems, made up of a diffuse network of sheriffs, court clerks, prosecutors, public defenders, and jail officials who all enforce the rules around who does and doesn’t end up behind bars. It’s hard enough to ensure that key details about a case pass from one node of this convoluted web to the other within a single county; forget about at the state or national level. That’s what makes a new criminal justice reform bill now making its way to Florida governor Rick Scott’s desk especially noteworthy. On Friday, the Florida Legislature approved a bill, introduced by Republican state representative Chris Sprowls, that requires every entity within the state’s criminal justice system to collect an unprecedented amount of data and publish it in one publicly accessible database. That database will store anonymized data about individual defendants—including, among other things, previously unrecorded details about their ethnicities and the precise terms of their plea deals. It will also include county-level data about the daily number of people being held in a given jail pre-trial, for instance, or a court’s annual misdemeanor caseload. All in, the bill requires counties to turn over about 25 percent more data than they currently do.
Wired
“Even though these are chain emails, the message is sadly the truth.”