By Colman M. Herman Last July, at a time when he was in the midst of his heated campaign for governor, Massachusetts State Treasurer Steven Grossman appears to have seriously violated the state’s Public Records Law. Responding to a public records request from me, Grossman claimed that he had no state credit card bills from […]
By John Ruch The Boston Police Department embodies the Surveillance Age’s chilling twin principles: more power to spy on law-abiding citizens, and less accountability for doing it. That’s what we at the Jamaica Plain Gazette and Mission Hill Gazette have learned as our attempts to investigate police spying abuses are stymied by the department’s flouting of state public records laws. The BPD […]
By James H. Smith Connecticut Superior Court Judge Stephen F. Frazzini is a respected, Yale-educated, former legal assistance lawyer, who in 2003 ruled that jurors’ names are public when a prosecutor tried to make them secret. But Frazzini stunned the legal community on Monday with a prior restraint order issued from the bench against the Connecticut […]
By Fran Silverman If you are interested in a product or service from a company based in Utah and want to research how consumers have fared, you’re going to be hobbled in your efforts. I recently found out when a public records request of mine was denied that government officials in Utah will not release complaints or […]
By Michael Donoghue Several Vermont police agencies, including the state police, have reversed themselves and resumed releasing breath test results when drivers are arrested for driving while under the influence of alcohol. The move comes after more than a 12-month effort by the Burlington Free Press for greater transparency concerning the arrests of impaired drivers on […]
By Taylor Dobbs In the past few months, the Vermont Department of Corrections and its health care contractor have been sued twice for what plaintiffs say were systematic failures in the prison health care system during the last two years. But a state law prevents the release of quarterly audit reports that supposedly took a […]
By Dave Rogers For journalists, police logs are an essential tool in terms of peeking into a community and determining what ails it. For example, just by seeing who is arrested and for what reporters can get a good sense if a community is experiencing an uptick in domestic violence incidents. But thanks to the […]
This is the second of two articles addressing a recent audit of Rhode Island’s Access to Public Records Act. The first article can be read here. By Linda Lotridge Levin An audit of the 2012 amendments to Rhode Island’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA) shows that a number of state agencies and municipal departments, […]
This is the first of two articles addressing a recent audit of Rhode Island’s Access to Public Records Act. The second article can be read here. By Linda Lotridge Levin A recent audit of open government practices in Rhode Island has found that six municipalities and 10 out of 24 surveyed state and quasi-public agencies are […]
By Robert A. Bertsche In a stark about-face, the highest court of Massachusetts last week took a step toward reducing access to criminal court records. It reversed its own ruling from 20 years ago — and picked a fight with the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals that could someday be decided by the U.S. […]