Transparency News 6/13/16

State and Local Stories

Lawyers representing the Daily Press Friday filed an appeal of a Newport News judge’s ruling that a database of state court information is not a public record. The Daily Press and reporter Dave Ress filed a lawsuit against the Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court of Virginia under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. The lawsuit asked the court to order the OES, the administrative agency for Virginia’s courts, to release the database. Six organizations have signed on to support the Daily Press in the endeavor – the Virginia Press Association, the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Gannett, BH Media Group (owner of the Richmond Times-Dispatch) and Landmark Media Enterprises (owner of The Virginian-Pilot).
Daily Press

Friday marked the four-year anniversary of the firing of University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan. Then-Rector Helen E. Dragas shocked the university when she announced the board’s decision, which eventually was reversed after a huge public backlash. Friday also marked the end of Dragas’ eight-year stint on the board, as the Virginia Beach businesswoman attended her final public meeting as a member. In a farewell speech, Dragas thanked other board members for putting up with her vocal opposition to many of the board’s recent decisions. “While we may disagree on policy, it’s never personal,” she said. “I respect each and every person at this table and appreciate you abiding my dissenting opinions.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch

More than 140 people have died in custody at local and regional jails since the state’s top watchdog agency was formed in July 2012, and the case of Jamycheal Mitchell was the first it had investigated formally. The agency, which among other things is tasked with ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse at state agencies and providing oversight of public mental health services in Virginia, said it ran up against its statutory authority investigating the case of Mitchell, who died alone last August in a feces-smeared cell at Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth.  Two months after Mitchell died in Hampton Roads Regional Jail, an attorney working on a separate case involving a jail in Staunton sent a letter to the Office of the State Inspector General challenging its authority to gather information for an investigation. The attorney, Roger Wiley with Richmond-based Hefty, Wiley & Gore PC, said his client, Middle River Regional Jail, should not have to turn over the medical records of a former inmate because state code doesn’t give the inspector general’s office the power to investigate local and regional jails.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Filing cases at the Rockingham County Circuit Court should get a little easier. According to Clerk Chaz Evans-Haywood, Rockingham is the first locality in Virginia to move to the e-File VA system, which happened earlier this month. Evans-Haywood said the e-File system is designed to simplify the paperwork process. “It doesn’t really save any time in my office, because we still have to take the information and put it in the state’s system,” he said. “It’s designed to make our system more user-friendly.” Evans-Haywood said the court had been registered with a system developed by the state, but it was rarely used. The program was created and is administered by Texas-based Tyler Technologies, which manages similar systems in 19 states, according to company rep Steven Pham.
Daily News Record


National Stories
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A State Department official produced to answer questions in a civil lawsuit probing Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server said no officials responsible for handling public records requests knew of her private email account while she was secretary, but was instructed not to answer whether the department’s top legal office knew, according to a transcript released Thursday. In a six-hour deposition Wednesday, answers provided by Karin M. Lang seemed to corroborate several defenses raised by Clinton and her aides in the handling of the controversy, while challenging other explanations given in a lawsuit by the conservative group Judicial Watch examining whether Clinton’s email setup thwarted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Washington Post

The Maine court system reversed itself on sealing some court records after pressure from media groups, officials said Wednesday. Dismissed criminal cases that had been ordered sealed will remain public records as they have in the past, according to a spokeswoman for the Maine court system. Media organizations led by the Sun Journal newspaper in Lewiston and attorney Sigmund Schutz from the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition objected after learning that court officials had begun sealing the court records last fall with no public notice.
Maine Sun Journal

The D.C. high court ruled June 9 that an obscure law doesn’t work as an almost total exemption for the D.C. Council from the broad public access requirements of the District’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), extended by the Council to cover itself in 2000. The law, known as the Legislative Privilege Act, is copied from similar language in the United States Constitution known as the "speech and debate clause" (Article I, Sec. 6) that protects Members of Congress and staff from lawsuits about what they say in their legislative function.
D.C. Open Government Coalition

CIA chief John Brennan said on Sunday he expects 28 classified pages of a U.S. congressional report into the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States to be published, absolving Saudi Arabia of any responsibility. "So these 28 pages I believe are going to come out and I think it's good that they come out. People shouldn't take them as evidence of Saudi complicity in the attacks," Brennan said in an interview with Saudi-owned Arabiya TV, according to a transcript provided by the network. The withheld section of the 2002 report is central to a dispute over whether Americans should be able to sue the Saudi government, a key U.S. ally, for damages.
Reuters

Editorials/Columns

Nothing is more important to the health and sustainability of a modern democracy than its citizens’ awareness of, and confidence in, what their government is doing. Excessive government secrecy — inherent, instinctive, utterly unnecessary and often bureaucratically self-protective — is poison to the well-being of civil society. It is useful to remember this simple precept Monday, the 45th anniversary of the 1971 publication by the New York Times of the Pentagon Papers, a classified government history of decades of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and the untruths the public was told about it. For the 17 days that followed, the Nixon administration and the press, already at odds, duked it out in the federal courts while the Times, The Post and other media withheld the information under judicial orders. Although the Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, on June 30 that the administration had not justified its demand for prior restraint on further publication, the legacy of the case has been a subject of argument ever since. Because the subsequent criminal charges against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the documents ended in a mistrial, the right of current or former government officials to reveal foreign policy misconduct has never been convincingly established.
Washington Post