AUGUSTA, Maine — The group that insures several Maine counties acted in “bad faith” when it did not comply with a request for public records, the state’s high court ruled on Tuesday.
It is the first time courts have defined the bad-faith standard in Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, the landmark 1970s law governing open meetings and how the public can request government information. Under the law, those who make requests can get attorney fees paid by a public agency only if it acted in bad faith by not complying with the request.
The 22-page ruling released Tuesday by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld a lower court’s decision to award attorney fees to the Human Rights Defense Center, a prisoner advocacy group that requested the terms of a $30,000 settlement between Kennebec County and a former inmate who alleged an officer used excessive force and assaulted him in 2019.
The basic terms of the settlement were reported by the Portland Press Herald in June 2021. Just after that, the advocacy group sought the settlement from the Maine County Commissioners Association Risk Pool, a group that insures several of the state’s counties.
After nearly two weeks of correspondence around the request, the Human Rights Defense Center got a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine to clarify that the advocacy group wanted the original records of the settlement. In a response, the county insurer said it believed Kennebec County had provided the only original record.
The Human Rights Defense Center sued in July 2021. In a court hearing, a risk pool official testified that he had specific documents on the settlement, but that “documents showing how much money was paid” to the inmate were never requested.
In a December decision, Superior Court Justice Daniel Billings said the county group “adopted bizarre interpretations” of the request to avoid producing documents, ordering it to pay attorney’s fees for the Human Rights Defense Center for violating the good-faith provision.
The high court agreed on Tuesday, saying the risk pool “mischaracterized” the request and ignored efforts to correct the issue, then “deliberately withheld access to documents in its possession that clearly were responsive to the request.”
This case has been viewed as an important one in defining the boundaries of Maine’s public-access laws. The Maine Press Association, a trade group for newspapers including the Bangor Daily News, joined an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs alongside other press interests.
“Establishing this standard is a significant victory for transparency and the ability of Maine’s people to hold the government accountable,” Anahita Sotoohi, a legal fellow with the ACLU of Maine, said in a statement.
