3 good articles on PLN records case settlement for $541k
The articles below were published by various media in WA today about our settlement in our long running public records case against the WA DOC. The suit was filed in 2000. Many thanks to
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/319142_publicrecord09.html
Corrections to pay $541,000
Record settlement set for withholding public records
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Last updated 12:38 a.m. PT
By AMY ROLPH
P-I REPORTER
The state Department of Corrections will pay a Seattle-based prisoner-rights newspaper $541,000 for withholding public records -- the largest public-records-related settlement in state history.
The judgment Friday comes more than seven years after Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, submitted two requests for public records detailing how 14 prison medical workers were reprimanded for their treatment of 10 inmates who died or suffered serious injuries. The records included one prisoner whose wound was closed with Krazy Glue.
"The fact that this was the biggest penalty payout in a public records case in state history kind of speaks for itself," said Wright, who was serving 25 years for felony murder in a 1987
Friday's settlement, filed in Thurston County Superior Court, comes after Prison Legal News spent years wading through the appellate court system. The DOC won the initial case and one appeal before the state Supreme Court ruled that the records should be turned over without names redacted with black ink.
"It was our belief that we were on solid legal ground," DOC spokesman Gary Larson said. "This wasn't a situation where the department ignored the law ... it was only when the Supreme Court ruled that we found we were wrong."
The DOC takes the state's Open Public Records Act seriously, he said. From January through March this year, staff members processed 1,100 records requests -- more than 75,000 pages of documents -- and many of those requests have been from inmates, he said.
But Michele Earl-Hubbard, the lawyer representing the newspaper, thinks the DOC didn't respond fast enough after the Supreme Court's ruling. If it had, the settlement might have been smaller, she said.
For all 266 days the newspaper didn't receive the documents after the ruling, the DOC agreed to pay $100 per request -- the maximum penalty allowed by law.
The issue became even more complicated when the DOC couldn't provide 19 pages of documents because the originals had been redacted.
"It was a simple mistake," Larson said. "It was not a willful altering of an original document."
That mistake added nearly $50,000 to the settlement. Peter Berney, a lawyer for the state, said DOC staff members supplied the redacted information after all; they were able to make out the words by holding the documents up to a light bulb.
Berney thinks that since the penalties are determined by how many days the DOC failed to provide the documents, "the department is kind of paying a penalty for the length of time it took to complete the court process."
Earl-Hubbard said she wonders if it would have taken almost one year for the DOC to produce the documents if the state weren't picking up the settlement bill.
"The checks they write are ultimately not their own -- it's taxpayer money," she said.
The settlement amount surpassed a recent court decision to raise the amount a Vashon Island man received because
About $200,000 of Friday's settlement is made up in penalties. The rest comprises attorneys' fees and other costs. Prison Legal News plans to buy an office in
As for the documents Wright requested in 2000, they're not much of a story anymore, he said. The documents included the DOC's account of the 1998 death of prisoner Charles Snipes, who died in his
"The reality is the fact that they kept the records under wraps for more than six years and basically killed the story," he said.
Wright plans to resubmit the request, this time asking for records from 2000 through this year. He wants to have a story in print by the end of the summer.
"Hopefully we'll get a more timely response," he said.
P-I reporter Amy Rolph can be reached at 206-448-8223 or amyrolph@seattlepi.com.
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Saturday, June 9, 2007 - 12:00 AM
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STEVE RINGMAN / THE
Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, sued the state Department of Corrections in 2001.
Corrections Dept. secrecy brings record fine
By
The state Department of Corrections has agreed to pay a record fine of $541,000 for wrongly withholding employee-discipline records from a prison watchdog magazine.
The agreement, filed Friday in Thurston County Superior Court, includes an admission that the agency destroyed 19 of the documents sought by Prison Legal News. That act, which the department called inadvertent, added nearly $50,000 to the award.
The fine, which was negotiated out of court, is the largest levied for a violation of the state's Public Records Act, which allows citizens to seek fines when they are wrongly denied access to public documents.
In this case, Paul Wright, who at the time edited Prison Legal News from behind bars, filed a pair of requests in 2000 with the department for records related to medical errors and discipline against prison medical providers. The department released more than 1,000 pages, but redacted so much information — including the names of disciplined employees — that Wright sued in 2001.
The department convinced a Superior Court judge and an appeals court that releasing the names would jeopardize the staff members and undermine prison safety. But the state Supreme Court in 2005 dismissed that argument and ordered the department to release the names and to pay fines and attorney fees dating to Wright's original request.
"The bad thing is this is the taxpayer's money," said Michele Earl-Hubbard, Wright's lawyer. But "it sends a message to agencies that if you violate the law, it will have an impact on you in the future."
Department spokesman Gary Larson said the fine was so large because it mounted each day and the case took a long time to decide.
"We thought we were on pretty solid legal ground on our interpretation of the law," he said. "It was only when we got to the state Supreme Court that we found out we were wrong."
Deficient medical care
Wright, who was released from a 17-year murder sentence in 2004, said the records show deficient prison medical care that his magazine, a monthly with 6,000 subscribers, has long documented.
Among the records are two cases of inmate deaths attributed to medical errors, including that of Charles Snipes, who was left to die in his cell at
They also show that a husband-wife team of physicians' assistants was fired in 1994 for gross incompetence: she was for sending a pregnant inmate back to her cell despite hearing no fetal heartbeat; he was for causing a patient to be needlessly airlifted to
"We knew medical care in prison was bad, and we knew their system of medical discipline was ineffective," Wright said. "It's one thing to know it; it's another thing to have the documents to prove it."
The payout awards Prison Legal News $200,000 in fines because the department withheld the documents, the result of a formula varying between $5 and $100 a day. Prison Legal News, which is based in
Blacked out originals
The fine was boosted by nearly $48,000 because the department acknowledged last year that it had also blacked out original versions of 19 documents. Larson called it an inadvertent mistake, and said most of the information was recreated by holding documents up to the light.
Earl-Hubbard, however, said the size of that fine indicated the seriousness of the error. "They never ultimately could produce records in a lawsuit, which is a huge mistake," she said.
Her firm, Davis Wright Tremaine, which also represents The Seattle Times, was awarded $341,000 in fees and costs.
The fine tops the $425,000 paid by
Wright, who now lives in
"Hopefully, they'll pony the records right up," he said. "Hopefully."
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Published June 09, 2007
Prisons must pay for delay on records
Brad Shannon
Judge Anne Hirsch approved the settlement Friday in Thurston County Superior Court.
“I think it is the biggest public-records judgment in the state,” said
Department of Corrections spokesman Gary Larson disagreed.
“We believe we were acting responsibly and within the law. … Two lower courts agreed with us,” he said.
Larson said he does not know how or from where the agency will find the money to pay the judgment.
It includes $200,000 in penalties to the newspaper for late disclosure of documents and $337,6646 for legal costs to Earl-Hubbard’s firm, Davis Wright Tremaine.
State Auditor Brian Sonntag, who is on the board of the open-government coalition, said he hopes the judgment grabs agencies’ attention, including that of local governments.
“What I hope comes from this is an increased sensitivity to public records and public information being readily made available to the public. This will be a very visible lesson to state agencies and local government that public means public,” Sonntag said. “The bottom line is it gets down to the mindset: Are we going to look for ways to make information available to the public or ways to find exemptions?”
Paul Wright wrote in an e-mail he intends to use the money to buy an office for his paper in
The case grew out of a 2000 request from Prison Legal News, which Wright founded while serving 17 years in prison for a felony murder in
Wright filed two records requests that were in dispute. He sought information about DOC employees who worked under restricted medical licenses because of past misconduct or whose care injured patients, including some patients who died in custody.
State prison officials provided more than 1,200 pages of documents in 2001 that had the names of prison workers, patients and witnesses blacked out. The “redacting” of names was necessary to protect the safety of staff, inmates and witnesses, the agency claimed.
After the Supreme Court ordered the documents released in 2005, DOC took 266 days to provide some documents, and 19 were discovered to have been damaged while the case was on appeal. The biggest penalties of $100 per day were paid for the damaged records — which had names blacked out on original copies and were reconstructed by holding them up to light.
Larson and assistant attorney general Pete Berney, who signed the settlement agreement, said much of the delay occurred when the public- records dispute was on appeal from 2002 to 2005. That was after Thurston County Judge Tom McPhee ruled that the agency was right to black out the names of medical personnel, victims and witnesses; an appeals court later agreed.
The Supreme Court reversed the case in April 2005 on a 6-to-3 decision authored by Justice Richard Sanders; Justice Mary Fairhurst wrote the dissent.
Once the Supreme Court ruled, Larson and Berney said the DOC needed time to review the documents again for redactions; they also needed time to let personnel named in the documents have a chance to seek court action, and other staff needed to reconstruct the damaged papers.
“All those are reasons that it took the time that it did from the time of the Supreme Court decision until April 2006,” Larson said. “It wasn’t an attempt to delay the production of these records …”
Wright, who lives in
Larson said he could only verify a portion of that, including $412,000 in settlements of bulk-mail disputes involving the newspaper in 2000 and 2005.
Earl-Hubbard has done work for other media companies in the Northwest, including The Olympian, on public records issues. She also is past president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, which advocates for more disclosure of government records.
Brad Shannon is political editor for The Olympian. He can be reached at 360-753-1688 or bshannon@theolympian.com.
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