Transparency News 3/31/16

State and Local Stories

An “overwhelmed” employee making $57,000 a year left a court order in a desk drawer that would have sent Jamycheal Mitchell to a state mental hospital. Instead, he spent the final months of his short life wasting away in a jail cell. It was one in a series of the system’s failures, and it’s impossible to tell whether Mitchell would be alive even if the order had been seen. State Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services officials released to The Virginian-Pilot on Wednesday an unredacted copy of the report on Mitchell’s death that it released last week with heavy redactions.
Virginian-Pilot


National Stories
​
Kirby Smart acknowledged Tuesday that he was indeed asked about Georgia’s Open Records laws when he visited the state capitol recently. But Georgia’s new head football coach said he “doesn’t deserve credit” for a controversial measure that slows the public’s access to athletics information. The bill, brought up and agreed to late on the night of March 22, would allow athletics programs in the state of Georgia to wait 90 days to respond to inquiries under the Open Records Law. That has been decried by First Amendment advocates. The 90-day response period is unprecedented, according to David Cuillier, an associate professor at the University of Arizona who looks at state public record laws, exemptions, and has written three books on FOIA laws. Most states allow for a response within three to 10 days. Others, such as Florida and Alabama, have general language.  Arizona language is “reasonably prompt,” and on average agencies will give a response of three to five days. “Is it reasonable to drag your heels for 90 days, for something you could probably turn over the same day, or very quickly?” Cuillier said. “Ninety days I have never seen. That is unheard of. I have never seen a football program, or any government agency, have the ability to hide the information from the public for that long.”
Dawg Nation

As far as a couple of UNC-Chapel Hill trustees are concerned, it’s getting too darn expensive to comply with all the public-records requests that are targeting their campus of late. Because the university in answering them has to screen out some information about employees and students that’s confidential under state or federal law, it’s had to go about “building a big institution within the institution” to handle them, trustee Chuck Duckett complained during the board’s most recent committee meetings. That means paying hiring additional staff, temps to go through documents one by one, or in some cases full-time workers to process and pass along the information. “At some point, you have to stomp the ground and say, ‘No, this is not right, enough is enough,’” Duckett told other members of the board’s external relations committee. The complaints surfaced after UNC’s vice chancellor for public affairs, Joel Curran, updated members on the university’s compliance with requests for the data that went into former federal prosecutor Ken Wainstein’s investigation of the so-called “paper classes” scandal.
Greensboro News & Record

A Hill East resident says she will sue the Department of Justice after it denied a public-records request she filed last year for data on criminal prosecutions in the District. Denise Rucker Krepp, an advisory neighborhood commissioner for ANC6B, held a Freedom of Information Act bake sale in December. She now says she intends to file a civil complaint against DOJ on behalf of the 2,000 people she represents in her Single Member District. Krepp alleges that the department has the type of information she asked for in November (ward-based data on prosecutions for alleged homicides, robberies, and other crimes over the previous five years) but did not share it. She's retained a lawyer from a local law firm (she declined to say who or which).
Washington City Paper