Transparency News 4/18/16

State and Local Stories

Del. Jackson Miller, R-Manassas, is asking for a formal Attorney General opinion on Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s lethal injection amendments – basically giving the Department of Corrections legal authority to assemble to combination of drugs used in executions. 
Miller, who sponsored the bill McAuliffe wants to amend, asked Herring to determine  if there is any law that prohibits the state from acquiring the drugs used in an execution in the way the governor proposed.
Daily Press

Virginia lawmakers return to Richmond Wednesday to consider Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s amendments and vetoes of legislation passed during the General Assembly session that concluded in March. Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled legislature will consider McAuliffe’s vetoes of 32 bills, the most by a governor since Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore rejected 37 bills advanced by a Democrat-controlled General Assembly in 1998. Most, if not all, of McAuliffe’s vetoes are expected to be sustained. Republicans alone — despite their majorities in the House of Delegates and the Virginia Senate — do not have enough votes to override the governor. While the veto votes on Wednesday might spur partisan speeches from both sides of the aisle, the greater debate will be over how the legislature resolves bills that the governor did not reject, but sought to amend. These include bills on issues ranging from the secret purchase of lethal execution drugs to carry out death penalty sentences, to Go Virginia — the economic development initiative, endorsed by the legislature, that McAuliffe has modified to concentrate more authority in the executive branch
Richmond Times-Dispatch

A grand jury that last month authorized Virginia State Police to investigate Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones has expanded its probe of connections between local government and Jones’ church beyond City Hall. The investigation initiated by Jones’ own invitation in January as a limited-scope review involving the city’s director of public works now extends to the Richmond Ambulance Authority, according to a subpoena for agency records that the Richmond Times-Dispatch obtained through an open-records request. Jones is named in the order for “any and all records related to Pamela Branch,” the authority’s former chief legal and human resources officer who also serves as clerk of First Baptist Church of South Richmond, where Jones is senior pastor. Branch left the agency abruptly in February after an internal review of her work triggered by revelations about the city’s public works director overseeing the construction of a new First Baptist campus in Chesterfield County during work hours. Calendar information obtained through an open-records request shows Jones met with agency officials in the weeks before Branch joined the authority.
Richmond Times-Dispatch




National Stories
​
Hundreds of pages of previously sealed court documents related to the federal probe of illicit funding of former D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s successful 2010 mayoral campaign were released Friday — shedding new light on an investigation that resulted in a dozen criminal convictions and cast a black cloud over city politics for years. The documents include affidavits in support of search warrants that allowed federal investigators to collect bank and business records from companies that paid for the shadow campaign, cellphone GPS data from key players, as well as email communications between members of Mr. Gray’s campaign. They suggest that the influx of cash was an open secret among the candidate’s staffers, who several times raised concerns about the source of the funding.
Washington Times

Winter isn't coming soon enough for one journalist. After hearing that President Barack Obama will receive early screeners of the upcoming season 6 of Game of Thrones, Refinery29's Vanessa Golembewski decided to put matters into her own hands. On Friday, Golembewski filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking that the leader of the free world "share his advance screeners" with the public. It may have been Golembewski's first FOIA request, but she clearly wasn't messing around.  She said she would pay "$0" for the information. And if they did want to charge her, she said the government should put it on her student loan tab.
Mashable

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley is currently mired in a scandal of his own making – an inappropriate relationship with a top adviser. The Republican was caught saying sexually explicit things to his senior political advisor, Rebekah Caldwell Mason, on a leaked audio recording. Both have denied that the relationship was ever physical. Mason has since resigned her position, and Bentley is now facing the possibility of impeachment. What’s unusual about Bentley’s troubles is, well, how unusual they are for governors these days. We last addressed the decline in gubernatorial scandals three years ago. At the time, we noted that between 2002 and 2010, there were at least two gubernatorial scandals percolating at any given time, peaking in 2004 with four governors simultaneously facing ethical troubles.
Governing


Editorials/Columns

Favor transparency when it comes to what elected officials do in your name? Most people do. Well, good luck with that, considering the returns from the Virginia General Assembly’s 2016 session. Jim Nolan of The Richmond Times–Dispatch reports that more than two-thirds of the 1,221 bills killed during the session—834—died without a recorded vote in committee. That is an 18 percent increase over last year’s toll, when half of bills died without a recorded vote, according to an analysis by the Virginia Public Access Project. Plainly, the legislature doesn’t give a hoot about accountability. Lawmakers are supposed to work for the people. Without knowing who voted which way on a bill or an amendment, how are Virginians to sort out what happened with policies, programs, budget items and legal changes that affect their everyday lives? Odds are, they can’t.
Free Lance-Star

Drug companies are increasingly leery these days about providing the drug mixtures that states need to put people to death. The reason: They don't want to be associated with this practice in any way. Many of these firms are from Europe, where capital punishment is frowned upon and there's pressure from governments and the people not to provide such drugs. That's a big problem for the death penalty in Virginia. But lawmakers should reject the governor's ill-advised gambit. The citizens of the commonwealth cannot abide any secrecy in the process by which the state executes its own citizens — including secrecy over where the chemicals come from. There's nothing graver than state-sanctioned death, and if the government can't be open about this, why bother to be open about anything?
Daily Press