November 9, 2021
Virginia Mercury
City employees are allowed to run for the City Council or mayor in Virginia Beach, but a council member would like to see that law change. Aaron Rouse is sponsoring an item on the city’s proposed 2022 legislative agenda for the General Assembly in Richmond. Council member Rocky Holcomb, a chief deputy in the Sheriff’s Office, said he’s not happy about the idea of restricting candidates. The request to amend the state law would prohibit city employees as well as employees of constitutional officers and the School Board from running for office. Rouse said he’s sponsoring it because of concerns he has heard from the community about potential conflict of interests and that it wasn’t anything personal against Holcomb, who sits next to him on dais and works for a constitutional officer. Other items in the city’s legislative agenda include: Revise the Freedom of Information Act to allow localities to withhold identifying information for complainants of nuisance-related, city code violations.
The Virginian-Pilot
A lawsuit in Washington, D.C., federal court seeks greater public access to non-prosecution agreements between the U.S. Justice Department and corporations that have faced misconduct allegations. The public records complaint filed on Friday asks a court to force the Justice Department to release 12 case files from 2015 and 2019 in which the government signed non-prosecution agreements with an array of corporate defendants. The complaint also demanded a list of all corporate non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements since 2009. . . . Plaintiff Jonathan Ashley, a business reference librarian at University of Virginia School of Law, created the Corporate Prosecution Registry website in 2017 with law professor Brandon Garrett, now at Duke University School of Law.
Reuters
Politico
Vanessa Bryant’s lawyers filed a motion Monday in her lawsuit over the helicopter crash scene photos taken by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies that, if granted, would require jurors to assume the wider public sharing of the images because evidence was destroyed. The motion for spoliation sanctions is the latest move in the lawsuit by the widow of Kobe Bryant for severe emotional distress after learning that deputies and firefighters shared gruesome images of the crash scene where her husband, daughter Gianna and seven others died in January 2020. The photos were shared internally and by one deputy who displayed his cellphone in a Norwalk bar and a fire captain who showed the images on his phone at an award show cocktail hour.
Los Angeles Times
Adam Marshall, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press