On June 7, 2018, the Michigan Court of Appeals handed down a FOIA victory, reversing the Monroe County Circuit Court in the case of Radford v Monroe County.
My client sought videos and other materials from the Monroe County Sheriff's department on a misdemeanor charge. Monroe County denied the FOIA. We settled the criminal case but proceeded with a civil lawsuit under FOIA.
The Monroe County Circuit Court was hostile to my case. The judge warned me that he did not see any merit in my client's action, and he said that he would sanction me unless I agreed to dismiss it. My client and I refused to dismiss it, and, a man of his word, the circuit court judge dismissed it and ordered attorney fees and costs to be paid to the county. (It should be noted that the circuit court judge refused to provide any reason for the sanctions, and a motion seeking reconsideration that sought clarification of the judge's reasoning was denied.)
In this epic reversal, the Court of Appeals held:
The court first explained in it s summary disposition judgment that defendants would not have decided whether to charge Radford with drunk driving until the blood test results came back. Therefore, in the court's estimation, all the information gathered was exempt until the test results were in. FOIA does not permit public bodies to wait nearly two years to explain why the production of public records would have interfered with an ongoing investigation. Here, the court had to fill in the blanks. But even the court did not explain how release of the recordings from the patrol car and station house would have interfered with the investigation.
Defendants do not even attempt to give the mandatory particularized explanation on appeal. On this record, the circuit court improperly summarily dismissed Radford's FOIA action as to the patrol car and station house recordings based on the ongoing investigation exemption.
The Court of Appeals also quoted one of my prior FOIA appeal victories, using it to rule in my client's favor:
We find instructive this Court's opinion in Katayama v City of Troy, unpublished per curiam opinion of the Court of Appeals, issued December 10, 2015 (Docket No. 323459), unpub op at 3, which described an adequate explanation under remarkably similar circumstances:
Plaintiff argues that because the case concerned his blood alcohol level, there was no ongoing investigation other than awaiting the results of his blood alcohol testing. We disagree. Defendant submitted an affidavit from the investigating officer explaining that at the time of the request, only six days after plaintiff's arrest, there were several aspects of the investigation that were not complete. The officer also averred that the investigation was not limited to whether plaintiff had been driving under the influence of alcohol because plaintiff was found in a location specifically identified by the police as one known for narcotic trafficking, prostitution, and vehicular larcenies. Under these circumstances, we agree with the trial court that declining a FOIA request made so shortly after the arrest was not improper.
A full copy of the opinion is available online: Radford-v-Monroe-County.pdf