New court rules hinder access to public documents

‘‘Our goal is to provide the records in a timely fashion,” Maryland court spokesman Darrell Pressley said. ‘‘In some cases a 24-hour turnaround is reasonable.”

The waiting period drew protests from a First Amendment lawyer, an ACLU staff attorney and the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association.

‘‘It seems clear that court rules require the clerks to produce these public documents quickly, and we expect them to do so,” said John J. Murphy, MDDC’s executive director and a former editor of The Gazette. ‘‘Reporters working on an article under deadline have a special need for the court clerk to act promptly. MDDC is working with the Maryland Judiciary to clarify this situation, and we hope to have it resolved soon.”

The Maryland Public Information Act generally limits the instances when agencies can withhold access to government documents. A provision of the act, however, allows the Maryland Court of Appeals to adopt rules for inspecting records.

Nearly everyone accused of a crime appears before a District Court judge at some point. The state manages the district courts. Counties manage Circuit Courts, which have not adopted the new records rules.

Alice Neff Lucan, the First Amendment attorney, said a 24-hour waiting period represents a change in policy for the court administration without prior appeals court approval. She was on the committee that issued the rules in 2004.

In a letter to Court Information Officer Sally Rankin, Lucan said those rules state that the court records are ‘‘presumed to be open to the public for inspection” during normal business hours.

‘‘That was intended to mean that when a person appears in the clerk’s office and asks for a record, inspection shall be permitted,” wrote Lucan, who represents MDDC.

Pressley said in an e-mail to The Gazette that the written requirement and the 24-hour waiting period to review the court files did not represent a change in policy.

‘‘We know the role the media plays, therefore our office encourages a timely turnaround of documents, again, understanding that some locations may have heavier daily caseloads than others and the turnaround time may be longer,” Pressley said.

David Rocah, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland, said judges in other cases have rejected Pressley’s argument.

‘‘Courts have rejected this ‘I’m too busy to respond to Public Information Act requirements,’ that responding to public records is part of the job of government,” Rocah said. ‘‘Requiring people to wait 24 hours, particularly a reporter on deadline, seems to provide no useful purpose. Presumably a clerk will be just as busy tomorrow as they are today and seems inconsistent with the statutory command that they be supplied immediately.”

In Montgomery County, District Court clerks have begun handing out applications when anyone asks to see public records.

At the bottom, the form cites a portion of the Maryland Public Information Act with a box to mark ‘‘Granted. (Custodian to produce records immediately or within a reasonable period, not to exceed 30 days)” or ‘‘Denied.”

Raquel Guillory, a spokeswoman with the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, said that if it were any other branch of government, the office would advise them to follow the Public Information Act requirement.

‘‘I didn’t even know they had their own rules,” she said.