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Isthmus and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty are suing the Madison Police Department for failing to provide public documents the paper requested more than a year ago.
Tom Kamenick, deputy counsel and litigation manager for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, says it was important to file a lawsuit in this case because the delay was so egregious.
“In my years of working on open records cases, I come across this problem frequently — record custodians push off responding to record requests, sometimes out of honest desire to do other work first, sometimes out of malicious intent,” Kamenick says. “But whatever their motivations, it’s illegal under the law and they’re not held accountable for these delays often enough. We hope bringing an action like this spurs more custodians to respond immediately to requests as the law requires.”
Kamenick filed the lawsuit Feb. 1 in Dane County Circuit Court.
The case regards a records request that Isthmus made with freelancer Gil Halsted, a retired Wisconsin Public Radio reporter, to the Madison Police Department on Dec. 7, 2016. The paper and Halsted asked for records related to Steve Heimsness, the police officer who shot and killed Paul Heenan in November 2012. Heimsness was later cleared of wrongdoing by both the Dane County district attorney and the police department. He retired in October 2013 after the department sought to fire him for reasons unrelated to the shooting.
The records request is not related to the Heenan shooting.
According to the complaint, in the three months after making the records request, Madison Police Lt. John Radovan clarified and narrowed the request. On March 22, 2017, Isthmus reporter Dylan Brogan paid the department $182.25 for 729 pages of documents.
“Over the next several months,” the complaint states, “Brogan called Radovan at least six times asking for MPD’s records. Each time, he was given variations of the same story — Radovan apologized for the delay, offered excuses for why the records were not ready to be produced, and promised to get right on it.”
The records were promised by the end of June 2017 and later, by the end of July 2017, according to the complaint.
On Aug. 1, 2017, Radovan emailed Brogan and Halsted “telling them he was finished and just had to go over the material with the city’s attorney in a meeting scheduled for ‘next Thursday.’ He also noted that there would be a 12-day waiting period due to having to notify employees" under state statute.
But the delays continued, with assistant city attorney Roger Allen promising to expedite the request.
It is now 421 days since the records request was filed.
The lawsuit is asking the court to compel the city to produce the records, pay attorney fees and punitive damages of not less than $100.
“We’re asking for punitive damages because we think this delay of over a year is unconscionable,” Kamenick says.
Editor's note: This article originally listed the wrong title for Tom Kamenick. He is deputy counsel and litigation manager for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty
