Transparency News 9/8/14

Nearly one-third of more than 180 recently surveyed law enforcement agencies in Virginia lack written interrogation policies, and only a handful require that questioning be recorded. The survey, the first of its kind in the country, was released today, less than a week after the DNA exonerations of two mentally disabled North Carolina men who “confessed” to the 1983 rape and murder of a girl during faulty police interrogations.Freedom of Information Act requests by students in the University of Virginia Innocence Project Student Group in 2013 netted the 116 policies. They had contacted more than 180 law enforcement agencies across Virginia. The group agreed to keep agency names anonymous when requesting the policies.
Times-Dispatch

When three or more elected officials gather together in the name of public business, it's a public meeting, and needs to be advertised. That was the theme at last week's annual Freedom of Information Act training for Culpeper Town Council.  Maria Everett, director of the FOIA Advisory Council state agency, conducted the seminar Tuesday in town hall with assistance from Culpeper Town Attorney Martin Crim. Six of nine council members attended with councilmen Keith Price, Pranas Rimeikis and Billy Yowell absent. Culpeper Town Councilman Dave Lochridge asked if there were consequence to three elected officials having a meeting.  Everett responded that perception is key.  "People will presume rightly or wrongly that you are discussing public business," she said. "That's where the trust issue comes in. It's not an illegal meeting — it's just a meeting in violation of FOIA law."  Someone could conceivably sue an elected official for having an unadvertised meeting, Everett said, and that person could be entitled to recover their attorney's costs.
Star-Exponent

Stopping to give directions to a mother and daughter visiting Christopher Newport University the day after former Gov. Bob McDonnell's conviction for corruption, political scientist Quentin Kidd heard a story that he thinks points to what the trial really means for Virginia, now and in the years to come. The story was about a thank-you note with a $25 gift card the woman's neighborhood watch group sent to a police officer who had come to give a talk, and about the polite note he sent back saying he had to return the gift card because he was just doing his job. "She said, 'If a policeman can't accept a $25 gift card, why can politicians take more?'" Kidd recalls. "I think a lot of people have trouble seeing that — how can a governor think it's OK to accept a Rolex when a policeman can't accept a gift card? I hear that a lot." "The verdict will leave a hugely lasting impression on public officials and aspiring ones in the commonwealth — and beyond as well," said political scientist Mark Rozell at George Mason University. "Whether there is legislation or not, people in public life will never doubt that they are under scrutiny and potential exposure for any gifts or favors that appear inappropriate," he said.
Daily Press

The McDonnell case is somewhat atypical because the so-called “quo” — what the McDonnells did for Williams — is not immediately obvious as an official act, legal experts said. Even before the trial, the McDonnells’ attorneys argued that Williams was afforded only routine courtesies and that defining those as official acts would effectively criminalize common political interactions across the country. The prosecutors’ decisive victory — McDonnell was convicted of all 11 public corruption counts he faced and acquitted of two bank-fraud charges — might spark similar cases elsewhere, experts said. The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section notably has received attention lately for tackling high-profile cases.
Roanoke Times

A private law firm hired to represent staffers for former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell at his corruption trial submitted a final invoice Friday for work in recent months for nearly $198,000,bringing the firm’s total bill to taxpayers to about $985,000. Attorneys from the firm Baker & McKenzie worked for the state at a steep discount, but their bills have been controversial because taxpayers incurred significant costs as a result of the McDonnell investigation.
Washington Post

A new round of ethics reform legislation may spring from the downfall of former Gov. Bob McDonnell on federal corruption charges, Del. C. Todd Gilbert, R-Woodstock, said Friday. Gilbert, who led the push for an initial package of ethics reform approved earlier this year, said the McDonnell case is likely to prod more legislators to consider additional changes aimed at avoiding future scandals like that which led a jury to convict McDonnell and his wife Maureen of more than a dozen felonies. "I hope perhaps we can build on the ethics reform that we passed in the last session," Gilbert said. "This should be a good opportunity to restore public confidence in government, and we should take the opportunity to do that."
Northern Virginia Daily

National Stories

18F is described by GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini as "the government's digital incubator" for new approaches to making departments and agencies more transparent. The group's name refers to GSA's headquarter location at 18th and F streets in the nation's capital. The group consists of 15 digital designers, programmers and product experts who also work as members of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows. Among the group's first projects "is working to create a clean, user-friendly online FOIA hub to submit requests to the federal government,"according to C.J. Ciaramella, editor of FOIA Rundown. Ciaramella covers transparency and whistle blower issues in the federal government for Washington Free Beacon and edits FOIA Rundown as a weekly email newsletter.
Washington Examiner

The U.S. government need not provide unredacted documents as to why it barred the importation of Canadian bison carcasses, a federal judge ruled. It has been 14 years since Conservation Force first teamed up with a group of hunters seeking import permits to bring Canadian wood bison hunting trophies into the United States, U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said. After U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service mooted the first action by finally denying the applications it had sat on for years, Conservation Force subsequently persuaded a court that the agency failed to state a "satisfactory explanation" for its permit denials. The denials were apparently prompted by a governmental adviser's policy-based disagreement with any decision to issue the permits, but that rationale was redacted from the record on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.
Courthouse News Service

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson lied when he said he had received "many" specific requests for the videotape that allegedly shows Michael Brown robbing a convenience store, according to a new report. "All I did — what I did was — was release the videotape to you, because I had to," Jackson told reporters on Aug. 15 when asked why he released the robbery footage. "I’d been sitting on it, but I — too many people put in a [Freedom of Information Act] request for that thing, and I had to release that tape to you." Writing for The Blot, Matthew Keys reports that the police department did not receive any specific requests for the videotape. "A review of open records requests sent to the Ferguson Police Department found that no news organization, reporter or individual specifically sought the release of the surveillance tape before police distributed it on Aug. 15," Keys writes. There was one reporter, Joel Currier with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who asked for any and all evidence "leading up to" Brown’s death in a FOIA request. The request could have possibly included the tape, since the incident report on the robbery identifies Brown as a suspect in the crime.
Huffington Post

Federal regulators are reversing course and will resume publicly releasing data on hospital mistakes, including when foreign objects are left in patients' bodies or people get the wrong blood type. USA TODAY reported last month that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly stopped publicly reporting a host of life-threatening mistakes, after denying in 2013 that it would do so. CMS says it will make this data on eight "hospital-acquired conditions" (HACs) available on its website.
USA Today

Hackers successfully breached HealthCare.gov, but no consumer information was takenfrom the health insurance website that serves more than 5 million Americans, the Obama administration disclosed Thursday. Instead, the hackers installed malicious software that could have been used to launch an attack on other websites from the federal insurance portal. Health and Human Services spokesman Aaron Albright said the website component that was breached had been used for testing and did not contain consumer information, such as names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and income details.
Governing
 

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