Transparency News 8/13/15

Thursday, August 13, 2015

State and Local Stories


TUESDAY, August 18, at 11 a.m., the Hopewell Circuit Court will hear arguments in Denton v. City Council for the City of Hopewell. The plaintiff is challenging the city’s use of a closed session Jan. 6, 2015, to pick the mayor and vice mayor for the upcoming term.
The packet submitted for summary judgment can be found on our website.

Most court clerks oppose releasing an expanded set of the records that have shown sentencing disparity based on race and low rates of prosecution of sexual assaults in Virginia. At least 51 of the elected clerks said they opposed releasing the records when asked by their association if they favored or opposed a request by court system administrators to provide the records to the Daily Press, according to an email from the president of the Virginia Circuit Court Clerks Association to members. Four said they planned to release the records and two said they would ask the Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court to release the records. "If you still want to add your vote to this poll to oppose sending your data to the Daily Press, please send me a quick email saying OPPOSE; or if you want to elaborate, feel free," Cathy Hogan, president of the clerks' association and clerk of the Bedford County Circuit Court emailed to the rest of the clerks Tuesday. Hogan would not comment when asked her position on the issue, or about the specific concerns of the clerks. She said she was doing so on the advice of the association's lawyer.
Daily Press

Virginia's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control has repeatedly mis-stated a basic premise of the state code it's relying on to withhold an administrative review into the bloody arrest of a University of Virginia student. The state's Freedom of Information Act allows the department to withhold the report, or at least portions of it. But the act also states that it is within the department's discretion to release it. The department has said repeatedly through a spokeswoman that the law prohibits release because the report is part of the personnel records of officers involved in the arrest. It has offered no further justification, despite the fact that the code it cites clearly uses the word "discretion."
Daily Press

Del. David Ramadan, a Republican from Northern Virginia and one of the state’s top watchdogs on Virginia ABC police agents, says Gov. Terry McAuliffe should release a report on the bloody arrest of a black University of Virginia student. Virginia ABC issued a press release Monday saying agents involved in the arrest of Martese Johnson outside a Charlottesville bar in March did not violate agency policy and had been returned to duty. But the report on what happened would remain secret. The arrest prompted protests on campus, and McAuliffe formed a review panel chaired by Public Safety Secretary Brian Moran, who oversees ABC, to study the department. That panel’s work is continuing. Ramadan said ABC agents “have proven to us now twice that they cannot deal with the general public. And that’s why I call on the governor and the secretary of public safety to issue that report. If there’s no wrongdoing then there should be nothing to hide and that report should be open to every citizen in the commonwealth, the media and to Mr. Martese Johnson.”
Virginian-Pilot

The Greene Supervisors have made small adjustments to their rules for a public comment period, but they still have plenty of critics. There was no absolute time limit Tuesday night on the matters from the public, and Chairman David Cox let everyone who signed up address the board. Patsy Morris remains unhappy with the board’s majority, and reminded them that elections are coming on November 3rd.
WINA

House of Delegates Republicans on Wednesday laid out their agenda for Monday’s upcoming congressional redistricting special session in Richmond, setting times for a committee meeting and public hearing. GOP leaders said the process — an 8:30 a.m. meeting of the Joint Reapportionment Committee and a public hearing at 3 p.m. — will provide an overview, input and criteria needed to produce a redrawn map.
Roanoke Times


National Stories
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Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday making California the first state in the nation to ban the use of grand juries to decide whether police officers should face criminal charges when they kill people in the line of duty. The ban, which will go into effect Jan. 1, comes after grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, made controversial decisions in secret hearings last year not to bring charges against officers who killed unarmed black men, sparking protests across the country. Calls for transparency also have come amid national concerns about disparate treatment of blacks and other racial minorities when encounters with cops turned deadly in Baltimore, Cincinnati and South Carolina. "What the governor's decision says is, he gets it -- the people don't want secrecy when it comes to officer-involved shootings," said retired judge and former San Jose independent police auditor LaDoris Cordell, the first African-American appointed as a judge in Northern California and a key supporter of the bill. "We're not trying to get more officers indicted. We're saying, 'whatever you decide, do it in the open.'"
Governing

Portraying herself as a victim, Pennsylvania's attorney general said Wednesday that criminal charges threatening to end her career were part of a "grand plan" to conceal pornographic and racially insensitive emails circulated among judges and state prosecutors. "I am innocent of any wrongdoing," Kathleen Kane said in her first public comments on the case. "I neither conspired with anyone nor did I ask or direct anyone to do anything improper or unlawful." She didn't address the specific allegations leveled against her last week, saying she couldn't on the advice of counsel. But she challenged a judge to make public the "filthy email chain" that led to last year's porn scandal, promising to call a second news conference and answer every question if the judge met her terms. A suburban Philadelphia district attorney charged Kane with leaking grand jury information to a newspaper reporter in an attempt to embarrass a former prosecutor she believed made her look bad, and then lying about her actions under oath.
Fox News

At the height of the scandal over the IRS’ handling of political nonprofits, Lois Lerner privately let loose at her Republican tormentors, saying she invoked the Fifth Amendment because they had been “evil and dishonest” and accusing them of “hate mongering.” A POLITICO examination of thousands of pages of emails and other material recently released by the Senate Finance Committee found previously unreported comments from Lerner, the central figure in the controversy, on everything from the inability of career IRS agents to handle “the sensitive stuff” to her views on the fiscal cliff.
Politico

The head of Florida's main open-government organization said Wednesday Governor Rick Scott should personally pay the $700,000 settlement costs of a public records lawsuit, rather than letting taxpayers pick up the tab. Scott agreed to a state-paid settlement after Internet giant Google was ordered to turn over relevant documents in a dispute with a Tallahassee attorney who accused the governor's office of secretly using private emails for state business."He’s playing fast and loose with our Constitution and we’re paying the cost, both literally and figuratively," Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, said of Scott. Petersen noted that Scott, a wealthy former hospital executive, spent about $71 million of his own money getting elected.
Reuters

Editorials/Columns

The Daily Press' lawsuit against an office of the state Supreme Court has stirred a surprising hornet's nest of opposition from an unlikely group: the court clerks themselves. Surprising, because court records are required by law to be public, and these men and women are placing themselves squarely athwart your right to see how your government operates.Unlikely, because every last one of them is an elected official. Which means you, dear reader, have the right — one might say an obligation — to vote out these misguided ladies and gentlemen who think our court system is their private sinecure, rather than a transparent temple to the rule of law. We do not wish to paint with too broad a brush. Our previous efforts to obtain these court records gained the willing assistance of Newport News Circuit Court Clerk Rex Davis and his successor Gary Anderson, who urged the Supreme Court to release data from their district. The Williamsburg-James City County Circuit Court did the same, as did the Norfolk Circuit Court and the circuit court serving Wise County and the city of Norton. But some of these court officials no longer believe themselves beholden to the public they were elected to serve. So we put it you, the citizens and voters of Virginia: Do court records belong to you or to the clerks whom you elect? If commercial firms can get them, and use them with no oversight, is it right to deny access to Virginians who are entitled to have them?
Daily Press

Sometimes the First Amendment guarantees access to public records (generally limited to court records). Often freedom of information acts and public records acts are seen as fulfilling broader First Amendment values, by facilitating speech about how the government operates. But earlier this week a federal district court in Washington held that the First Amendment limits public records requests for certain information, when revealing that information unduly exposes people engaged in First Amendment protection to risk of harassment. The court had expressed similar views in its decision granting a preliminary injunction against release of the records, which I blogged about last fall; but I thought I’d pass along the most recent decision, granting a permanent injunction.
Eugene Volokh, Washington Post

THE PAST year’s rash of law enforcement shootings of unarmed civilians has brought new attention to an age-old question: Who is policing the police? A plan from D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to make public some footage from officer-worn body cameras offers one answer. Ms. Bowser’s proposal would move the District closer to holding police accountable, but perhaps not close enough. Ms. Bowser’s revised proposal, circulated in a memo last week and reported on by The Post’s Aaron C. Davis, represents a change of heart. It would give prosecutors and academic researchers unrestricted access to video and allow subjects of police recordings to review taped encounters in a police station at no cost. Yet the plan comes with caveats: For example, footage would not be publicly available when there are charges pending against an involved officer or civilian; when a case involves domestic violence or sexual assault; or when the video is recorded “inside a residence or any other place where a person has a heightened expectation of privacy.” Some of this is understandable. Victims of domestic violence, for example, are often wary of calling the police and might be even less likely to do so if they could end up on YouTube. But the Freedom of Information Act already allows for exceptions in cases of pending investigations or valid privacy concerns. It remains unclear why additional rules and restrictions are necessary.
Washington Post

When William Wampler came to New College, it had given up its goal of becoming a branch of an existing four-year institution in the state. It’s now functioning as a training and regional higher-ed center for colleges across the state to offer in-person and distance learning programs. What is most troubling in the information the Times-Dispatch uncovered was the degree to which New College board members and top state legislators were unaware of the scope of Wampler’s compensation package. “Good grief!” was the response of a state senator who serves on the college’s board, but not its executive committee. State auditors were just as surprised; such supplemental packages are allowed but must be reported. The jury’s still out on Wampler’s 3½-year tenure at New College. What’s clear, though, is that transparency — at all levels of government — in Virginia very much remains a work in progress.
News & Advance

The recent Supreme Court decision involving Texas license plates and the display of the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, often described as the Confederate flag, is, however, a different kind of case. It is a case that leaves Virginia with a clear policy choice. Virginia can accept the idea that what appears on license plates is government speech that the Legislature may regulate. Alternatively, it can decide freely to define specialty license plates as a public forum for private speech offered to all Virginians without government oversight of content.
Claire Guthrie Gastañaga