Withholding Public Record In Bad Faith

In theory, the majority of public records should be freely available for public review by citizens, unless defined differently by  state or federal legislature providing for some clearly explained exemptions. But if you do just a little bit of background investigation probing into the motives in an effort to check whether in practice those exemptions are as few as they should be, you’ll get doubtful whether the provisions aren’t interpreted too often freely, causing citizens to seek protection of their rights in court when individual believes he or she has been unlawfully denied the access.

Probably, such cases start occurring rather frequently. There’s a noticeably growing number of lawsuits against custodian organizations or against particular official in charge of making the decision as for that specific criminal or government record should be denied public access due to its restricted status have been filed and won.

From one hand the tendency inspires optimism, because after all that’s what our democracy is all about. But from the other hand there’s the reverse side that causes valid worry. Public official should feel responsibility and be afraid of being adequately punished should they elect to keep the community ignorant of a particular public record content solely based on their personal negativism instead of being governed by law. Sorry, the law itself isn’t perfect, and maybe it’s time the action should be taken to enforce it?

To make it clear what I mean, here’s the case:

A friend of mine from Arizona filed a suite after being denied access to another of his prospective employee’s court record, which he  needed to run a background check on, and the court found no other legal punishment than compensating the attorneys fees to him as a plaintiff, even if the ruling stated the “record was withheld in bad faith”.

The state of Arizona is believed to enjoy one of the best laws across the nation regulating public records access, for it provides for truly wide range of the records to be regarded as accessible, while the list of the exemptions is very short. But the same law has no clause providing for penalty for public official who would wrongfully deny a public record access. Isn’t it astonishing?