Transparency News 10/29/15

The Virginia Coalition for Open Government is pleased to announce the winners of its 2015 open government awards. The three winners represent the public, government and media, and all have worked on the same issue: access to court-case information.

Dave Ress, a veteran reporter at the Daily Press in Newport News, has been pressing the Office of Executive Secretary for more than a year to gain access to a database of court case records that would shed light on the way cases are concluded. It’s a database the OES used to distribute and that supports the office’s online case-by-case search, but in 2014, the office changed course and refused, claiming the office wasn’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act and insisting the data belonged to the clerks of court anyway. Ress and the Daily Press filed a lawsuit to gain access to the database; the case is still pending.

Meanwhile, Ben Schoenfeld, a so-called “civic hacker” with Code for New River Valley, wrote source code to have a computer code "scrape" the case data from the OES website. He wasn’t able to get all of the database’s data, but he got enough for Ress to analyze it. Ress discovered troubling trends in the way race influenced the way a case was handled.

Schoenfeld, the Laurence E. Richardson citizen award winner, has also worked with reporters at The Roanoke Times to develop vacircuitcourtsearch.com, a site that searches all localities for cases pending against an individual, an much quicker and easier process than the one offered by the court system’s locality-by-locality search.

Jack Kennedy, the Clerk of Court for Wise County and the City of Norton, was one of only a handful of court clerks to freely give Ress the data his locality sent to the OES for inclusion in the state database. Not only that, Kennedy pleaded with his fellow clerks, a majority of whom did not want to turn over the data through a FOIA request, to release the data because “the insights to be learned from the analytical measurements will benefit all parties wittingly or unwittingly.” Kennedy has consistently been an early adopter of technology and methods to improve public access to the court case and other records maintained in the clerks’ office.

The winners will be presented with plaques at VCOG’s annual conference, Nov. 12, at Gari Melchers Home and Studio Pavilion of the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. For details about the conference, visit www.opengovva.org/access-2015-schedule-panelists. Coverage of the conference as a news event is welcome.
 

State and Local Stories

Hopewell’s top prosecutor has asked state investigators to examine a potential conflict of interest stemming from an undisclosed intimate relationship the former city sheriff says he had with a councilwoman while she was voting on his budget. That council member — current Hopewell Vice Mayor Christina J. Luman-Bailey — has denied the relationship with former Sheriff Greg Anderson and calls it a political ploy. In a meeting with reporters Wednesday in Richmond, she vowed not to resign. But she declined to address further any allegations on the advice of the city’s legal counsel, citing an ongoing investigation. Anderson, 66, on Wednesday called Luman-Bailey’s denial a “charade of innocence.” He produced travel receipts and several intimate emails that he said the two had exchanged. In one email Anderson shared, he warns Luman-Bailey not to use an official email account. “You should not and I should not email to this address as it is the city email and could be FOIAble,” he wrote, referring to the possibility of the correspondence being made public through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

More than a dozen staff from the Virginia Department of Education are in Franklin County this week to investigate a binder full of complaints from parents of children with special needs. The state launched the review in response to a range of concerns that several families shared with state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, in letters and in a meeting last month. Some of the parents’ frustrations with the school system date back years, and have been regularly brought up at the Franklin County School Board’s meetings. Parents said they turned to Stanley because they did not feel the district was taking their concerns seriously, and are glad the state is now investigating what they say are systemic problems that range from failing to provide adequate services for children with special needs to bullying parents who have demanded changes.  Stanley didn’t determine whether the allegations were true — that’s not his job — but it is his job to help the people he serves get in touch with the agencies that can help them, he said. In addition to his duty as a senator to pass along the complaints, Stanley, who is a lawyer, said he felt a moral and legal obligation to do so. Stanley made an unplanned visit to the most recent school board meeting after one member was asked to recuse herself from a discussion about the investigation. At home at the time, Stanley put his suit back on and headed to the meeting because he said he wanted to clarify to the board that the member, Blackwater District representative Crystal Naff, had not initiated the complaints. Because Stanley’s visit was unplanned, it caused confusion for board members about how to give him an opportunity to speak while still following Virginia’s laws that govern public meetings. The board considered going into closed session, and announced it was doing so, before changing its mind and deciding to hear Stanley’s comments in the open, according to an audio recording of the proceedings.
Franklin News Post

National Stories
​
Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction. Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for. “Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”
New York Times

“DEAR Ms. Coe,” an archivist at Marquette University, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s alma mater, wrote in an email, “I regret to inform you that all post-1946 correspondence is sealed for the lifetime of McCarthy’s daughter.” The archivist pasted a link to the collection’s finding aid before concluding, “She has not responded to any inquiries on this matter.” I was trying to gain access to the senator’s papers for a book project. I’ve worked in lots of government archives, and while the bureaucracy can be a hassle, I usually find what I need. Not this time: Short of suing Senator McCarthy’s daughter or Marquette, I have no real means of recourse. That’s because the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to the legislative branch. When Congress enacted the F.O.I.A. in 1966, it was after the executive branch’s records, and tailored the law to fit its needs.  Why are there different rules for the executive and legislative branches of government? The obvious answer is a disheartening one: Congress makes the rules, and its members have chosen to exempt themselves.
New York Times

America needs a more aggressive approach to cybersecurity, a former spy chief opined on Tuesday, includes sharing more of the information that he calls "hideously overclassified." "American industry hides the ball from one another and from the public for fiduciary reasons, and the American government hides the same ball because of the hideous overclassification of cyber-related information," retired Gen. Michael Hayden said in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute. Hayden served as head of both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. He added, "Let's begin to share more data, the data leads to a common picture, which leads to an adult conversation. I have confidence we're bright people, if we're all looking at the same data, we'll find a range of options we find acceptable."
Washington Examiner