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Appeals court says sheriff must produce unredacted records

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//April 12, 2016//

Appeals court says sheriff must produce unredacted records

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//April 12, 2016//

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An appeals court has affirmed a ruling in an open-records lawsuit that an immigrant and worker’s rights group filed against Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

Voces de la Frontera sued Clarke last April, alleging that he had failed to produce copies of certain forms the group had requested about two months before. The forms were I-274s, which ask local jail officials to hold prisoners for an extra 48 hours for possible immigration violations.

Voces uses the information in the forms to monitor whether Clarke is following the recent rules that have narrowed the country’s deportation procedures, which involve officials at the state, local and federal level. Critics have said the procedures lead to improper deportations.

Clarke eventually produced the records, although certain parts had been blacked out. Voces asked the trial court to compel Clarke to produce the complete records.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge David Borowski ordered Clarke on June 3, 2015, to produce those records. Clarke later appealed and the appeals court granted a temporary stay while it considered the appeal.

Clarke argued that federal open-records law has an exemption that allows the records being sought by Voces to be blacked out. He contended federal law should apply in this case because it trumps state law.

Clarke also argued that the public benefit of keeping certain parts of the records closed outweighs that of making them entirely open.  He noted, for example, that the information blacked out in the documents included identifying numbers that federal immigration authorities use for tracking cases. Clarke argued that, if those numbers were released, someone who hacked into the federal database could use them to modify data and evade law enforcement.

Voces, on the other hand, contended that the exception allowed under federal law should not apply, because the detainees described in the forms were not in federal custody. The group also argued that Clarke failed to show that there was a public interest that out-weighed fully disclosing the information in the records.

A three-judge panel on Tuesday affirmed Borowski’s order, lifting the stay the court had placed on Voces de la Frontera’s open-records request, and instructing Clarke to produce the complete immigration forms.

The appeals court affirmed the order because it found that no exemption to the state’s open-records law should apply and because Clarke had failed to meet his burden of showing that the public would benefit more from not revealing certain information than from full disclosure.

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