Transparency News 6/1/15

Monday, June 1, 2015

State and Local Stories


Roanoke School Board members met privately Thursday night in an unprecedented special meeting called with less than a half-hour’s notice to the public. Notice of the 9:30 p.m. meeting came 21 minutes before its start. In the notice sent to members of the media, spokesman Justin McLeod said Chairman Todd Putney called the meeting to discuss the performance of a high school employee. The board met in a closed-door session to discuss the personnel issue and concluded the meeting roughly an hour after its start. After the meeting, Putney said the group did not take any action regarding the employee, whose identity has not been disclosed. The special meeting was held about 12 hours before the first of two high school graduations were to be held in Roanoke. Under Virginia law, most personnel information is private except under narrow circumstances. Putney said he could not comment on the board’s discussion.
Roanoke Times

Open Virginia Law has a lengthy post up about a FOIA case that will be argued before the state's highest court next week. Del. Scott Surovell, D-Mount Vernon, is pushing the Virginia Department of Corrections to release various records related to the death penalty, including the department's execution manual. The question: What duty does the department have to redact portions of that manual that may legitimately be sheilded from public view versus refusing to release the manual at all?
Daily Press

Look up an article on police body cameras or tune into a recent broadcast about them, and there's a good chance you'll encounter a familiar name: Police Chief Kelvin Wright. Here he was on Washington-based Governing magazine's website in April: "Across this country, officers will wear these very much as they do their sidearm." And on National Public Radio two weeks later: "I think that as it becomes more prolific and that body-worn cameras become the norm, I think that we in law enforcement will be the better for it and I think society will see the benefits of it as well." He's done interviews with newspapers across Virginia; a TV station in Kansas City, Mo.; even the news channel Al Jazeera America. As the national conversation about police practices and body cameras continues, many agencies are turning to Wright for input. He was an early adopter of the cameras, with officers in his department using them since 2008. Other departments now want to learn from Chesapeake.
Virginian-Pilot

A District judge dismissed a misdemeanor threat charge against Norfolk Councilman Paul Riddick on Friday morning. Judge Frederick Aucamp said Riddick's threat to heckler Danny Lee Ginn during an April 14 council meeting did not amount to a criminal threat under the statute "because he did not threaten you with bodily harm." Riddick declined to comment after leaving the courtroom. His attorney, F. Sullivan Callahan, said that "justice has prevailed. I don't think Mr. Riddick did anything wrong at all. And I think that the court has vindicated his position." Ginn said he disagreed with the judge's ruling. "That's the interpretation of the law," Ginn said. "I have to accept that. I don't have to agree with it. If you read the transcript (of the City Council meeting), it's obvious that he's challenging and threatening."
Virginian-Pilot

A federal judge has ruled that the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors’ longstanding practice of reciting Christian prayers before its meetings remains unconstitutional, according to a court opinion released Friday. “The practice of the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors of opening its meetings with prayer, the content of which is determined by the government itself, consistently invokes one faith tradition and does not provide an opportunity for persons of other faith traditions to participate …” U.S. District Court Judge Michael Urbanski wrote in his opinion. For years, members of the board of supervisors publicly recited sectarian Christian prayers before board meetings. The decision is the latest ruling against the county in a three-and-a-half-year legal battle between supervisors and county resident Barbara Hudson, who has been represented in court by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. The latest ruling by Urbanski, who originally issued a permanent injunction in 2013, modifies it to cite major differences between the county’s former practice and one in last year’s U.S. Supreme Court case, Town of Greece v. Galloway.
Register & Bee


National Stories
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For many Americans, the idea of technology that can block automated telephone calls sounds like a solution to all those annoying “robocalls” and interrupted family dinners. But to the nation’s pollsters and campaign professionals, many of whom are gearing up for the 2016 election cycle, a federal government proposal circulated Wednesday to encourage phone companies to embrace the technology feels like an existential threat.
Politico

Tracking the public appearances of the [U.S. Supreme Court] justices is surprisingly hard. They are public officials and public figures, and they seem to like the acclaim and influence that come from appearances before friendly audiences. But many of them appear wary of more general public scrutiny. “The court does not release the justices’ speaking schedules ahead of time and only posts transcripts of the appearances on the court website if the justice volunteers them,” said Ms. Kwan, who founded Scotus Map along with Jay Pinho. “We are under no illusion that we have compiled all of the events out there.” Scotus Map gathers 90 percent of its information from web and social media searches, Ms. Kwan said, with the rest coming from “tips from friends and Twitter followers.”
New York Times

Are state laws limiting campaign contributions in trouble? A decision by a federal appellate court makes it appear possible. On Tuesday, a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a district judge to take a new look at Montana's contribution limits. Republican committees and business and nonprofit groups had challenged the 1994 law, which limited individual contributions (to $170 for legislative candidates and $650 for gubernatorial  tickets) arguing it violated free speech. U.S. District Judge Charles C. Lovell had struck the law down in 2012, finding that the state's contribution limits were too low to allow challengers to compete against incumbents and be competitive. The three-judge panel found he'd used the wrong reasoning, however. The appellate court rules that the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010 means that however, states can only limit campaign contributions in order to prevent corruption.
Governing

Anyone who’s tried to get information from the government knows that some agencies will get back to you within a reasonable time, at least to let you know they’re working on it, and then send the info in compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Others, such as the State Department, have been known to ignore you for years, while others just stiff you outright. Now the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, a 26-year-old nonprofit, decided to test 21 various agencies’ responses to requests for documents under that act. First, they sent identical requests on the same days (either Jan. 22 or Jan. 23) and  made those requests as simple as possible. So they didn’t ask, for example, for information that might need to be partially censored for some sensitive national security or other reason. They only asked for lists that the agencies are supposed to maintain, in a basic requirement of the law, of what other folks have requested. “Proof that the request was, indeed, a simple one, came in just nine days,” TRAC co-directors Susan B. Long and David Burnham recently wrote the House Oversight committee, “when we received data” from the Department of Homeland Security headquarters. But, as of April 24, “when we published our report, only seven out of 21 agencies had provided usable data,” they wrote.
Washington Post

The legal authority for U.S. spy agencies' collection of Americans' phone records and other data expired at midnight on Sunday after the Senate failed to pass legislation extending their powers. After debate pitting Americans' distrust of intrusive government against fears of terrorist attacks, the Senate voted to advance reform legislation that would replace the bulk phone records program revealed two years ago by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Although the Senate did not act in time to keep the program from expiring, the vote was at least a partial victory for Democratic President Barack Obama, who had pushed for the reform measure as a compromise addressing privacy concerns while preserving a tool to help protect the country from attack. But final Senate passage was delayed until at least Tuesday by objections from Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican presidential hopeful who has fulminated against the NSA program as illegal and unconstitutional.
Reuters

Thousands of websites are blocking Congress’s access to their sites in a show of force to protest the Patriot Act. Led by the online activist group Fight for the Future, more than 10,000 sites have added code that redirects any visitors from Internet protocol (IP) addresses from Congress away from their site and towards a protest page.
The Hill


Editorials/Columns

The parents of Aurora theater shooting victim Alex Teves have a seemingly simple request for the media: Stop publishing the alleged shooter's name and face. Tom and Caren Teves and their many supporters argue that continuing to publish his name and picture in newspapers, to mention his name on the radio and to relentlessly show his face on television and websites make families victims yet again and give him the notoriety he has sought. Prosecutors have suggested the suspect saw killing people as a way to improve his personal stature. They've shown evidence indicating he considered several different approaches to murder before settling on attacking a theater.
Trevor Hughes, USA Today

The Quantico Town Council has learned a lesson about the Code of Virginia. Last month, the council members decided they wanted some say in who could take their pictures or videotape them during a meeting. So they passed a town ordinance saying no one can use cameras at the meeting without permission. But, the council members learned, their ordinance butted heads with a state law that says just the opposite. The Freedom of Information Act says that government bodies can’t even meet in a facility that prohibits recording or photographing the meeting.
Free Lance-Star