Mr. Sunshine's Dark Side
Editor and ex-con Paul Wright
One of his "ongoing priorities," state Attorney General Rob McKenna likes to say, is the promotion of "government accountability by encouraging open access to government." But quietly wending their ways through the legislature are Senate Bill 6294 and House Bill 3219, companion measures requested by McKenna, which will restrict that same access.
Former prison inmate Paul Wright, now the editor of Prison Legal News, thinks the bills in fact will discourage the people’s right to know and prevent any new crusaders like him from lawfully seeking government information.
As an ex-con, Wright doesn’t expect sentiment to be on his side. After all, if approved, the legislation would change the way compensation is paid when the state violates the public record laws involving prison inmates: any penalties won in court would be awarded to the crime victims compensation program rather than to a prisoner whose record request was improperly handled.
McKenna, the self-professed Mr. Sunshine, maintains such awards are a “lottery" attracting unreasonable prisoner record requests, around 4,000 a year. If there’s no possibility for an inmate payday when courts find the state unlawfully failed to disclose public information, perhaps fewer requests will be made.
But this isn’t about paperwork, it’s about accountability, says Wright. Rather than comply with existing law — and avoid such penalties in the first place — McKenna would prefer to stifle the access he claims to support. In his capacity as PLN editor, Wright last year won a record $541,000 fine from the state (and McKenna’s office) for illegally withholding disciplinary records of state prison medical providers (about $200,000 of the award went to PLN, the rest to legal costs).
Wright is free, having served his 17 years for second-degree murder of a drug dealer. But the records case began while he was an inmate, editing PLN from his cell. If this proposed law had been in effect, his publication would not have received compensation for a long, commendable effort to open state records as the law required; in fact, the effort might never have been made, and McKenna would not have had to disclose not only the records on poor state medical care — one inmate was left to die in his cell — but the fact that the Department of Corrections intentionally destroyed some of the data.
"Very few prisoners — four, maybe? — have won public disclosure suits against the DOC in the past few years," Wright says. "And most requests are from prisoners seeking to examine their prison or medical files to get documents they need on their sentencing." The legislation won’t affect that volume, he says, but it will end any more long and lawful crusades from within, "and that's what it's really about."
4 comment(s)
DidTime says:
You\'re right about no one caring about what prisoners do in prison. Until, of course, they get out...
Posted On: Tuesday, Feb. 5 2008 @ 2:13PM
LaDonna says:
When is \"Taxi to the Dark Side\" coming to Seattle?
It won an 2008 Oscar as best documentary and was released elsewhere on 2/25/2008.
Posted On: Wednesday, Feb. 27 2008 @ 11:04AM
Tim Ford, ATG Open Government Ombudsman says:
The Attorney General\'s Office took great pains to develop legislation that did not hinder prisoners’ ability to request public documents—just like any other citizen.
Nothing in Senate Bill 6294 or House Bill 3219 prevents prisoners from making public records requests. Nothing protects state agencies that fail to comply with the state public records act from having to pay attorneys’ fees or penalties for their lack of compliance. Nothing prevents inmates from being awarded attorneys’ fees when they win a public records case.
Rather this legislation attempts to address the abuse of the public records law by inmates who file onerous requests with the hopes of supplementing their income with huge penalty awards. Instead, our legislation requires any penalty awards to be paid to the crime victims’ compensation fund—a consistently underfunded account that provides assistance to innocent crime victims to help them pay for medical and other expenses caused by crimes against them.
As The Weekly’s story notes, in 2007, DOC agreed to pay a record fine of $541,000 for wrongly withholding employee-discipline records from Paul Wright’s magazine. Our bills would not have limited Wright’s newspaper from collecting the penalties because the fines were being paid to a business not an individual inmate. However, this case illustrates the lucrative nature of the public records business.
Wright claims these bills would “end long and lawful crusades from within” because most requests are being made by “prisoners seeking to examine their medical or prison files to get documents they need on their sentencing.”
Nothing in our bills prevents these truth seekers from requesting access to such records in the future. Nor do they prevent inmates from winning attorneys’ fees due to them.
The Public Records Act was approved by the people as a means to hold their government accountable. I am certain voters never intended the act to be used as an alternate source of income for prison inmates with unlimited amounts of time to file records requests.
Posted On: Wednesday, Mar. 5 2008 @ 4:31PM
Rick A says:
Here\'s a response from Paul Wright:
How about asking Mr. Ford how many PDA cases brought by prisoners have resulted in payouts by the DOC in the past five years? I think the number is less than six.
He misses the point that the DOC already has little incentive to comply with the public records act. Why not go a step further and require that DOC officials found to have violated the PDA be required to pay the fees and penalties from their own salaries? There is also the slippery slope argument. First stop prisoners from getting penalties, then who is next? Corporate media? Non profits? Everyone?
If the victims fund is underfunded the legislature needs to appropriate more money for it, not hope that lawless government agencies will bankroll it.
The most stunning hypocrisy here is that McKenna campaigned as a proponent of open government. As the lawyer for the state agencies he can avoid penalties against the DOC and other agencies by simply ensuring they comply with the law and release records upon lawful request.
Posted On: Thursday, Mar. 6 2008 @ 9:22AM