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ARIZONA---Phoenix Newspapers Inc. is headed to the state's highest court in its effort to obtain copies of private e-mail messages written by government employees and sent from publicly owned computers.
Arizona's Court of Appeals in Tuscon has ruled that those e-mails aren't subject to Arizona's public disclosure laws.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reports that David Bodney, attorney for The Arizona Republic, said that "If left standing, this decision would seriously undercut the public's ability to keep tabs on public officials and [on] public resources. It allows a public official to pronounced his own e-mail as purely personal and therefore beyond public review".
The private e-mail messages of Michael Schiavo, employed by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Department in Florida have also become an issue.
In Florida, electronic mail or "e-mail" has been determined to be public records subject to the state's Public Records Law.
Patricia Gleason, an assistant Florida attorney general and Sunshine Law expert, says there's no exception in the law for conversations or meetings conducted through e-mail.
When a public records request was filed by The North Country Gazette in April for copies of all emails received and sent by and Michael Schiavo from Jan. 1 through April 15 of last year, Marianne Pasha, the public information coordinator for the sheriff's office, first tried to claim that upon checking Mr. Schiavo's email account, he hadn't received or sent any emails during that period.
Gleason has said that any time there is discussion between two public officials, such as Schiavo and other sheriff's office employees, that's the event that triggers the Sunshine Law, regardless of whether the discussion is held via e-mail or over the telephone or in person.
Pasha says that unless emails set guidelines and establish policies or procedures, they are considered "transitory" and we are not required to maintain a permanent record of every email message".
Pasha refused to provide any of the personal e-mail messages of Michael Schiavo and charged NCG $137 for over 300 sheets of paper which contained non-responsive or innocuous information including many duplicate pages and pages which contained nothing more than a computer code. NCG was also charged over $70 for the labor of a computer technician to "retrieve" the messages.
Several law firms have expressed an interest in suing the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office in order to obtain the Schiavo emails.
According to the RCFP, the three-judge Arizona Supreme Court ruled that in order for an e-mail message to be deemed public, it must not only be created by a government employee on a government computer, but it "must also have some relation to the official duties of the public officer that holds the record".
The decision reversed a lower court's ruling ordering the release of all the public employee's e-mail messages.
The Republic was seeking to review all e-mails sent and received by Stan Griffis, Pinal County Manager for his last 60 days in office. The RCFP said that an investigation had revealed that Griffis had allegedly spent $21,000 on sniper rifles and related materials along with an African safari.
But Griffis refused to release some 120 messages, which he claimed were "documents of a personal nature" including those dealing with a personal vacation and purchases from online retailers. 8-19-06
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© 2006 North
Country Gazette
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