LDF to support access issue in Phoenix
The LDF committee voted to provide amicus support for Griffis vs Pinal County. It involves the suspension of Stanley Griffis from his job as county manager after he used public dollars to buy $21,000 worth of sniper rifles, ammunition and other related gear without approval. Phoenix Newspapers, which owns The Arizona Republic, is seeking 90 e-mail records from the time when state officials were investigating Griffis for this conduct.
Griffis claims that these e-mails are private and related to his personal travel and online shopping, and thus are exempt from the Arizona Public Records Act. Phoenix Newspapers is claiming that the e-mails (which it has not seen) are so closely related to Griffis' breach of his official duty that they are clearly public documents as defined by the Arizona Public Records Act.
SPJ lawyer Laurie Babinski explains the brief:
The amicus brief asks the Arizona Supreme Court not to examine whether private messages on a government-owned computer system can ever be exempt from the state open records law, but rather to determine that the particular e-mails in question are so closely related to Griffis' breach of his official duty that they cannot be considered exempt. (No state exempts from its open records laws documents related to the breach of an official duty.) As the amicus brief states: "It was Griffis' purchase of guns and ammunition with public dollars that makes these e-mail messages public records, not the simple factual fortuity that he used a public computer to relay those e-mail messages." The amicus brief also argues as a procedural matter that allowing Griffis to claim that such records are private, without any evidentiary showing or judicial review of the documents, would render the Arizona Public Records Act useless since organizations petitioning for the release of such records are unable to show otherwise.