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editorials & columns
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 "Judges have a responsibility to ensure a fair trial for defendants, but they also have an obligation to balance those needs with the constitutional protections for openness in the courtroom."
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Newspapers have seen their business model savaged by the Internet. How has that transformed news coverage of Virginia's annual legislative session? VPAP's latest data visualization compares the mix of General Assembly articles aggregated in VaNews in 2014 and 2018. (Comparison not exactly apples-to-apples; VaNews began carrying non-newspaper content in 2016.)
VPAP
THE TRIAL of Portsmouth minister and City Council member Mark Whitaker was postponed again on Tuesday, just as the public was on the verge of learning more about the government’s case against him. For almost a year, the case has been covered in an unusual shroud of secrecy, raising questions and concerns about how it is being handled. Surprisingly little information about the case is available in court documents or has been shared publicly, and that’s in part because two presiding judges have restricted public access to important details. Chief Portsmouth Circuit Judge William Moore Jr. sealed the grand jury testimony last year before recusing himself from the case. And then retired Hampton Circuit Judge William Andrews III, who was selected to oversee the trial, took that secrecy a big step further last November by ordering the public and media out of the courtroom so attorneys could argue their motions in private. The secrecy surrounding Whitaker’s case raises questions about why judges feel the need to keep important information hidden from the public. Judges have a responsibility to ensure a fair trial for defendants, but they also have an obligation to balance those needs with the constitutional protections for openness in the courtroom.
The Virginian-Pilot
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stories of national interest
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A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit alleging that the White House failed to prevent President Donald Trump’s aides from using encrypted apps that automatically scrub messages after they’ve been read. U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in favor of a motion by the Justice Department to dismiss the case, despite acknowledging that its underlying arguments held some merit. The lawsuit, launched by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group, called for the courts to rule that the use of such apps violated the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which mandates that the White House take steps toward maintaining “presidential records.”
Politico
The disciplinary records of all public servants in Hawaii — except police officers — are available to the public. Police disciplinary records can only be made public when an officer is fired. Suspensions, even lengthy ones, are not disclosed and the public can’t find out names and other details. An amendment to House Bill 1849 passed Thursday would mandate the same disclosure of police officers’ disciplinary records as applied to other public employees. It would eliminate the requirement to conduct a case-by-case balancing test between “the public interest in disclosure” and “the privacy interests of the individual” that’s currently required.
Honolulu Civil Beat
The Public Access Counselor (PAC) of the Illinois Attorney General’s office recently issued two binding opinions addressing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Specifically, the opinions found two public entities violated FOIA by improperly applying the “trade secrets” exemption and the “private information” exemption.
JD Supra
Transparency advocates predicted that new rules for governments would result in a treasure trove of data on tax breaks for corporations. But so far, just half of reporting municipalities have disclosed that information. Of the local government data collected by the tax break transparency group Good Jobs First and analyzed by Governing, a little more than 600 of 1,222 governments did not disclose any revenue lost to tax incentives on their annual financial report. Many of them made no mention of the new accounting rule at all. And while others did, they said their losses were "immaterial" and therefore were not reported. (States are subject to the new rule, too. While most have followed disclosures, their data was not included in the analysis.)
Governing
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