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The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland accused the Maryland State Police have not released all of the records from their spying activities on peace and anti-death penalty groups in Baltimore in 2005 and 2006.

The state police filed a motion to dismiss the Public Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU in June, claiming the lawsuit was not needed because all the documents have since been released and that the ACLU waited too long to file the lawsuit for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization in Baltimore.

The state police documents — notes from an undercover state trooper who attended Baltimore Pledge of Resistance meetings from March 2005 to May 2006 — refer to other reports that were not included in the release, a clear indication that not all of the documents have been turned over, ACLU staff attorney David Rocah said.

Rocah called the state's motion a "cynical" ploy on the state's part.

"It's a pretty cynical attempt to get free of the lawsuit to get it dismissed on technical grounds that are without merits," he said. "They argue they already disclosed everything. We lay out in our briefs why there is substantial evidence that they haven't disclosed everything. The other argument is the most audacious thing I've seen in a long time, that it should be dismissed because the plaintiff waited too long to sue when we took them at their word they had disclosed everything. Their own argument is you can't take the Maryland State Police assertions at face value. That's one of the most surprising arguments I've ever seen a lawyer make."

Assistant Attorney General Sharon B. Benzil blamed the delays on the ACLU's failure to respond for months after the state police initially denied their request.

"They sat on it for seven months," she said.

The ACLU's lawsuit also was very specific as to a document and not to other documents, she said.

Benzil said the motion was not "cynical" and that such comments from Rocah were not productive.

The ACLU is assuming that references to other reports meant they were in writing when it could refer to oral reports, she said.

The state police spied on peaceful activists and provided information to the Baltimore Police, the National Security Agency, and the Joint Terrorism Task Force and created records in the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Case Explorer database, according to the ACLU's lawsuit.

To list the peaceful activities of peace activists and anti-death penalty foes as "potentially violent" and "terrorism" does not make sense, Rocah said.

"There isn't the slightest scintilla of evidence they were anything but peaceful," he said.

The fact that the state police based its spying off "hypothetical" possibilities from the peaceful activists leads to the possibility that other groups also were spied upon, Rocah said.

In its motion to dismiss the Public Information Act lawsuit as too late, the ACLU points out the state created delays for months in releasing the information. The first PIA was filed on Aug. 29, 2006, but the state did not even respond to it for four months and after a second request was filed.

Benzil argued in her motion that several people involved in the chain of command have retired since 2006.

Sen. Brian D. Frosh, chairman of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, said he had not seen the ACLU filing. Frosh's committee intends to hold hearings before the next legislative session starts in January.

"There's some indication in the documents that there's other material," Frosh said. "We've asked for documents beyond what they've produced for the ACLU."

Gov. Martin O'Malley appointed Stephen H. Sachs, a former U.S. attorney and Maryland attorney general, to investigate the state police spying.

Sachs said Monday he had not seen the latest filing from the state police or the ACLU. Sachs has two assistant attorney generals appointed to assist him in his investigation, but they are "walled off" from the attorney generals representing the state police in the ACLU's lawsuit.

No hearings are scheduled yet on the motions and Benzil said she did not expect there would be until Sachs completed his investigation.