This story will be updated.
The Maine State Police will have to turn over more information about officer misconduct after the state’s two largest newspapers successfully sued the agency to force it to comply with Maine public records law.
In a May 26 ruling, a Penobscot County Superior Court judge ordered the state’s largest police force to unredact portions of trooper discipline records.
The decision comes a year after the Bangor Daily News and Portland Press Herald jointly sued, arguing that final disciplinary records are public under the Maine Freedom of Access Act and reflect a core principle that with public service comes public accountability.
“The interest in public access to public employee disciplinary decisions is particularly compelling when the employees in question are law enforcement officers vested with great public authority, including the power to make arrests, detain citizens, and use force,” reads the court complaint by Sigmund Schutz, an attorney for the Press Herald.
The newspapers had separately requested several years worth of those records under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act and used them to collaborate on an investigation into the state police’s lack of transparency around officer misconduct. State troopers’ records were written in such a vague way that, in most cases, it was impossible to deduce why the officer was punished. The reporters uncovered some of the misconduct concealed in the records, learning that the agency sometimes handed down lenient sanctions for serious misbehavior.
But some misbehavior has remained secret because, of the 85 pages of documents the state police turned over, 14 of them contained redactions — a move the news outlets argued was unlawful.
The state police submitted a legal justification for each redaction, but, in many cases, the court did not agree, finding that the state had redacted public information about trooper misconduct that had resulted in punishment.
“Therefore this information was not redacted for just and proper cause and must be disclosed,” determined Justice William Anderson.
The judge also found the state’s search for records to be inadequate and ordered officials to conduct another search. Specifically, some of the disciplinary documents referred to other final records of discipline, but those were not turned over to reporters. The lawsuit had sought to resolve confusion over language in the state police’s union contract that allows the agency to remove misconduct records after certain periods of time. During oral arguments, the state said it didn’t know if the records had simply been removed or destroyed.
“The state is hereby ordered to perform a supplemental search for the ‘missing documents’ which shall include records of final discipline and settlement agreements for the period described in plaintiffs’ FOAA request,” the judge ordered.
In several cases the judge allowed the redactions to stand when medical information would have been disclosed.
The reporting and lawsuit were funded in part by the Washington D.C.-based Pulitzer Center. Law students at the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School worked pro bono with the newspapers’ attorneys.
