A New Jersey state appellate court has upheld a public records fee of $1,900 for government records that were requested by a freelance journalist because several attorneys were needed to assist with the request.

Journalist Janon Fisher fought the fee, but the court decided that the charge was reasonable. The court said the state Attorney General’s Office had legitimate reasons for assigning five attorneys to collect and review the public records that were requested.

In a 3-0 decision, the court panel wrote that the Attorney General’s office “reasonably determined that those attorneys could identify the records responsive to the OPRA request and any privileged parts of those records more expeditiously and reliably than clerical staff.”

New Jersey state attorneys spent 52.5 hours to search and review thousands of e-mail communications and other state records to locate the requested documents. The total cost to fill the public records request was $1,877.93. The cost of the public records request was determined by multiplying the total hours by the hourly wage of the lowest-salaried deputy attorney general, which is $35.77 an hour.

The appellate court panel found that in addition to copying costs, New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act allows for a public agency to impose a “special services charge” if production of the records involves “an extraordinary expenditure of time and effort.”

New Jersey state attorneys said that Fisher’s records request took the state nearly two years to complete and included the review of more than 15,000 emails and electronic files.

Source: NewsDay.com

This is an election year - a time when public records requests on politicians and candidates peaks. Wisconsin’s WCCO is reporting on a story involving that state’s Republican Party and its filing of a public records requests on a Democrat county supervisor.

A spokesman for the Wisconsin Republican Party, Kirsten Kukowski, confirmed to WCCO that a request has been made for two years of public records on Brown County Supervisor Jack Krueger.

The public records request is seeking to obtain all communications, including, e-mails, phone records and document files involving Krueger from April 15, 2006 to the present.

Krueger is a member of the Brown County Democratic Party and former chairman of Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District Democrats.

Krueger says that he has no idea what the public records request is ultimately after.

Krueger is also the vice chairman of the Brown County Board. He plans to run for board chairman when the new County Board meets on April 15. Kukowski hopes the public records request will be filled before Krueger takes on any new position.

According to Lynn Vanden Langenberg, director of Brown County’s administration department, most of the requested records have been gathered and sent to Brown County Corporation Counsel John Jacques.

Jacques will review the records, like he does with all public records requests, and then Krueger will review them.

By law, there is a three-day period for elected public officials to review public records that are requested about themselves and make clarifications to those records.

Source: WCCO.com

The Tennessean is reporting on the growing complexity of public records law in Tennessee and the increasing difficulty involved in obtaining public records in that state.

Tennessee opened government records to the general public in 1957, but lawmakers and judges have taken steps over the last 50 years to close many of those records.

There are currently more than 250 exemptions to the Tennessee Public Records Act on the books.

Proponents of public records argue it should not be easy to close public records in Tennessee. They believe that the exemptions are broadly written, which enables needless government secrecy.

There is even a bill moving through the Tennessee state legislature that would close public records that identify citizens licensed to carry handguns.

The executive director for the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, Frank Gibson, says, “any special interest who has a friend in the legislature can get records closed fairly easily.”

According to Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, Tennessee, compared with other states, falls in the middle in terms of the way it closes public records.

Davis points out that Florida has nearly 1,000 closed records. Although the number seems high, Davis claims that Florida should serve as a model for other states, because each exemption is extremely narrow and specifies the exact part of the record that is being closed from public access. Specific criteria must be met in order for a public record in Florida to be closed.

In comparison, Tennessee public records can be entirely closed when only a small piece of information should be kept secret.

Public records laws differ from state to state, however, it is generally accepted that secret information such as a person’s financial records or medical records should be off limits to the public.

In addition, information on national security or trade secrets are considered closed records. It’s also generally understood that law enforcement professionals need to keep investigations secret while the case is open.

However, some public records exemptions aren’t easy to excuse.

In Tennessee, morbidity and mortality records on nursing home residents is kept confidential.

Gibson says that educating the public on the importance of open records is one of the biggest challenges to changing public records laws.

“The problem is, citizens do not seem too concerned until it is an issue that involves them,” says Gibson. “If it’s emotional enough, like the gun issue, you’re able to argue, ‘Hey, there’s states giving gun permits to convicted felons — are you sure you want to close this?”

Source: The Tennessean

WikiNews is reporting that over 600 pages of official Church of Scientology ‘Operating Thetan’ documents have been posted on the WikiLeaks website.

According to the report, some parts of the ‘Operating Thetan’ (OT) manual have been leaked before, but this is believed to be the first time the full version of the document has been made public.

The 612 page Scientology manual was written by L. Ron Hubbard and contains instructions for the eight different Operating Thetan levels including ‘clear’ and OT8.

The WikiLeaks.org website is devoted to publishing private, classified and censored information from government and corporations around the world.

Source:WikiNews Reports

The Associated Press is reporting that Superior Court Judge Glenna Hall from Washington state’s King County has ruled that inmate Allan Parmelee could not be stopped from making public records requests.

Parmelee is a convicted arsonist who was imprisoned for firebombing cars of two attorneys. Since his imprisonment he has been filing public records requests seeking to obtain information on prosecutors, prison guards, state troopers, judges and other people who helped convict him.

Parmelee has filed hundreds of public records requests since his imprisonment.

Prosecutor Dan Satterberg asked Hall to allow his office to ignore the pending requests and also to bar Parmelee from filing additional public records requests unless he obtains court permission.

Satterberg believes that Parmelee is using the requests to harrrass law enforcement officials.

Judge Hall’s decision stated that Satterberg’s legal argument against the requests stretched public records laws.

Hall’s decision requires that some of Parmelee’s pending requests be filled — such as his requests for pictures of King County employees, including judges; lists of names, job titles and pay scales. They all are public records.

Hall stated “He has been characterized as not only annoying or vocal, but violent,” she wrote. “Even so, the law requires the court to presume that access to the public records he seeks is in the public interest, and not make him show his purpose.”

Parmelee stated that he was overall pleased with the ruling.

The prosecutor’s office is deciding whether or not to appeal the decision.

Parmelee was convicted at a second trial in 2004 of first-degree arson for firebombing one vehicle belonging to his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer and another belonging to an attorney who represented his roommate’s ex-girlfriend.

His first trial ended in a mistrial because he was found to have personal information about the jurors.

Under the Washington’s public records law, much personal information is exempt from release.

If a record is public, agencies can’t decide to release it to one person but not another. There is no limit on how many public record requests person can file.

Source: Associated Press

The Associated Press is reporting on an interesting public records story. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency has requested that The Advocate newspaper of Baton Rouge, Louisiana pay nearly $210,000 for a public records request that requires the agency to produce over 2 million pages of documents.

The Advocate is investigating FEMA’s response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita and has officially requested the documents relating to the agency’s inspection and maintenance of government issued trailers and mobile homes. FEMA states that the first 100 pages of any public records request are free and every page thereafter costs 10 cents to produce for a total cost of about $210,000.

FEMA spokesman James McIntyre states that the agency charges for large public records requests that requires pulling FEMA employees from other jobs to handle the processing of the request.

The executive editor of The Advocate, Carl Redman, stated that FEMA has used stalling tactics to avoid the complying with the public records request ever since it was submitted in September 2006.

The newspaper is requesting copies of contracts, invoices and other public records associated with the trailers and mobile homes that have housed tens of thousands of victims of the 2005 hurricanes.

Source: MediaInfo.com

The Social Security Death Index ( or SSDI as it is commonly called ) is a searchable database of deceased people that is maintained by the U. S. Social Security Administration, using their Death Master File records.

As of this post, the Social Security Death Index contains over 80 million records of people who were reported to the U.S. Social Security Administration as being deceased from 1962 to the present.

You can search the Social Security Death Index for deceased people by entering one or more pieces of information about the person, including: last name, first name, middle initial or the person’s social security number.

If there is a record of that person’s death on file in the Social Security Death Index database, the search engine will return the following information to you about the deceased person: first name, middle initial, date of birth, date of death, last known residence, last benefit, social security number and the state that the SSN was issued in.

NOTE: not all deceased U.S. citizens are listed in the Social Security Death Index.

There are several reasons a person may not be listed in the Social Security Death Index search, including the following:

# The death wasn’t reported to the Social Security Administration.

# The death occurred before the SSA’s Death Master File was maintained on a database. About 98 percent of the deaths in Social Security Death Index database occurred from the year 1962 - present.

# The deceased person did not participate in the Social Security program.

# Survivor death benefits are still being paid to the person’s dependents or spouse.

# The person’s death may be too recent and, therefore, not indexed yet.

# Other human errors.

The Social Security Death Index search is routinely used by genealogy researchers to find records of deceased family members as well as fraud investigators to find out if a social security number ( SSN ) is on record as having belonged to a deceased person.

Rootsweb.com offers a free SSDI people search that anyone can use @ Social Security Death Index Search Engine.

More and more states are making voter registration verification records publicly available with free online searches.

Most of the state voter registration searches require users to input one or more of the following pieces of information:

- The person’s first and / or last names.

- The person’s address, often including county.

- The zip code of the person’s residence.

- The person’s date of birth.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program has a list of states that offer online voter registration record verification online.

Currently, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, DC, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia offer some type of voter registration records search online.

You can access the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s list at State Voter Registration Verification Web sites.

Source: PI Buzz

Connecticut’s state judicial system has made public criminal and motor vehicle violation records available with a free website search.

According to an Associated Press article, this move towards more open and easily accessible public records has drawn praise from freedom of information advocates and criticism from privacy activists.

Over 1 million of Connecticut’s criminal conviction records, going back to 2000, are now available with one web search. The open records effort to put public criminal records on the web came from the recommendation of a state task force of judges, state officials, attorneys and members of the media.

The task force recommended putting all felony and misdemeanor convictions on the web, allowing misdemeanor records to be removed after five years.

Criminal case records and motor vehicle violations were already a matter of public record, but the web search makes them available without people having to make a special trip to the state archives and search through public record files.

You can do your own public records search on Connecticut’s Conviction & Bond Forfeiture Dispositions Criminal/Motor Vehicle database by defendant name at jud2.ct.gov

Source: stltoday.com

EastValleyTribune.com is reporting on an Arizona Court of Appeals ruling, favoring faster responses on the part of state and local governments to public records requests.

The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled unanimously on Tuesday that government departments cannot make people wait for weeks or months for public records that have been requested.

The public records ruling states in part that government records custodians “shall promptly furnish such copies, photographs or printouts.” The ruling goes further by saying that any public records request that is not handled promptly is deemed to have been denied.

The ruling did not specify a time for “promptly”. However, Justice Murray Snow stated that there is no way that a delay of more than 100 days, as happened in a case involving the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, can be considered reasonable.

The ruling acknowledged that delays have to be judged on a case-by-case basis. However, the justices also concluded that public agencies can’t avoid their legal duties for prompt responses simply because a government employee neglected to honor the request.

The public records legal case involves a number of requests made by New Times for sheriff records. These ranged from personnel records to investigation reports about Dan Saban — at the time of the request, Dan Saban was running against incumbent Sheriff Joe Arpaio — on sexual misconduct charges.

The records requests took over 143 days to handle, after the election was over.

The court ruled that this was not a “prompt” handling of the request under Arizona’s public records laws.

The ruling, however, does not end the legal battle. The judges sent the case back to the trial judge to decide if the delays were in bad faith or were arbitrary and capricious. These legal standards will determine if the county is obligated to pay the legal fees for the newspaper.

Source: EastValleyTribune.com