Attention, open government advocates!"
The opening shot in what is apt to be a long legislative siege has been fired.
Rep. John Blanton (R-Salyersville) has pre-filed 21 RS BR 985, "relating to private information of public officials."
If enacted, the bill will:
•create a new section of the open records law "exempting personally identifiable information of judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers" from the open records law;
•declare dissemination of personally identifiable information a Class A misdemeanor; if intentional, a Class D felony;
•establish a civil right of action for actual and punitive damages, costs, and attorneys' fees against "a perpetrator" who disseminates the information if the law enforcement official or her family is harmed by the violation; and
•create "a new felony of disseminating personally identifiable information on the internet about a law enforcement officer."
The bill contains a provision declaring an emergency "because of the ease of publishing personal information over the internet and social media, and the increase in death threats and deaths [sic] to judges and other public officials." If successful, it will "take effect upon passage and approval by the Governor or upon its otherwise becoming law."
Personally identifiable information relating to all public officials and employees, but unrelated to their public duties, *is currently protected by the privacy exception to the open records law* and can be/always is properly withheld.
This suggests that Blanton's bill is yet another legislative solution looking for a problem.
But the privacy exception does *not* protect the *names* of judges, prosecutors, or police officers — or any other public official or employee for that matter.
Blanton's bill clearly defines protected personally identifiable information to include the individual's *first and last name*, declaring that "[a]ll personally identifiable information of a judicial officer, prosecutor, or law enforcement officer shall be exempt from the Open Records Act and shall not be released to the public."
If Blanton's bill were currently in effect, the names of the police officers at the center of the Explorer Scout scandal, Kenneth Betts and Brandon Wood, would be categorically exempt. So, too, would the names of officers Myles Cosgrove, Brett Hankison, and Jonathan Mattingly who served the search warrant on the home of Breonna Taylor and whose actions resulted in her death.
However compelling the public's interest in disclosure of the individual judge's, prosecutor's, or law enforcement officer's name might be — whether commendation for exceptional conduct or condemnation for egregious misconduct — public agencies would be foreclosed from releasing the names on pain of criminal penalties and civil damages.
The bill bears some of the earmarks of an unsuccessful bill sponsored by Sen. Danny Carroll (R-Paducah) in 2019. But that bill — which was widely criticized by open records advocates — did not go so far as to extend blanket protection to the *names* of public officials and employees, including judges, prosecutors, and police officers.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5677184-BR821-by-Sen-Danny-Carr…
Most offensive among the many offensive (and unnecessary) features of Blanton's bill is the notion that public officials and employees should be permitted to anonymously conduct the public's business and secretly discharge their taxpayer-funded duties because that business and those duties expose them to a lesser or greater risk of harm.
Without reference to how great or small that risk may be — or the fact that every employee who enters the workplace faces risks — the bill offers absolute protection to judges', prosecutors', and law enforcement officers' names. This item of information, the attorney general has repeatedly recognized since 1982, "is personal but is the least private thing about them."
Leaving aside the chilling effect on public access created by the extensive mechanism for civil and criminal liability, the redundancy of the already available protection for non work-related personally identifying information, and the practical impossibility of implementation, Blanton's patently tone-deaf bill's categorical exclusion of the names of judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers from the open records law is fundamentally at odds with "[t]he public's 'right to know' that its public servants are indeed serving the public."
