This morning's Hartselle Enquirer covers an intriquing open records lawsuit currently underway in Alabama,
Hearing on e-mail leaves questions to be answered.Judge Steve Haddock dismissed a lawsuit from a local sheriff who wanted to prevent his county commission from releasing as public documents the e-mails on servers in his department. The sheriff also unsuccessfully asked the judge to grant a request that the sheriff's department henceforth have its own e-mail server.
In a separate lawsuit initiated by a county commissioner, Judge Haddock declined to turn over a disc containing 250,000 e-mails.
(E-mail requestor) Stacy George decided to seek legal recourse when he was refused access to a disc containing about 250,000 e-mails by Glasscock, Clark and Hannah. Later, he claimed some of the e-mails that were subject to the investigation were erased or destroyed and sought permission to conduct an inventory to determine which ones were missing.
The Catch-22 for those who seek copies of emails is that unless an agency turns over a complete record of all its emails (in this case, the disc containing 250,000 e-mails) you can't be sure that the agency has fully produced all the e-mails you've requested. The plaintiff is this case clearly believes that some of the e-mails he wants have not been produced. Therefore, he wants access to the entire set of emails so he can make sure that everything he asked for was made available to him--or find it on this disc, if it wasn't.
On the other hand, it's likely that at least some of those 250,000 e-mails contain material that is properly exempt.
Obviously, in most cases, it is far too expensive to pay someone to sift through that volume of e-mails in order to redact exempted material.
“I’m not going to order this disc to be turned over to George,” Haddock said. “I could ask a senior judge to view the e-mails at $250 per hour. But who’s going to pay for it?”
Labels: Alabama, the email gap
