In a recent decision, a Maryland court ruled that the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights only creates procedural protections for officers involved internal investigations, and does not affect the ability of a third-party—for example, a person who made a complaint that initiated the investigation—from accessing records related to the proceedings.
The ruling by the Court of Special of Appeals of Maryland comes at a time when transparency in law enforcement is a major topic of statewide discussion, in the aftermath of a series of damning videos showing police assaulting Baltimore citizens.
The ruling arose from a 2009 incident in which Sgt. John Maiello of the Maryland State Police left a voicemail message for Teleta Dashiell, whom Maiello believed to be a potential witness in a case he was investigating. Believing he had hung up the phone, Maiello referred to Dashiell using a racial slur, which prompted Dashiell to file a complaint against Maiello.
The complaint would eventually be “sustained” by an internal state police investigation, and Dashiell was notified of the judgement in a letter from the agency, which claimed that appropriate disciplinary action had been taken. When Dashiell, aided by her attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, filed a public information request to determine exactly how Maiello was disciplined, the request was denied by Maryland State Police on the basis that the relevant documents were personnel records and thus exempt from disclosure under the Maryland Public Information Act.
A Maryland circuit court initially sided with the state police decision. The Court of Special Appeals, however, found that the circuit court erred in not reviewing all of the relevant documents in the case to determine whether each one should be exempt from the requirements of the MPIA individually.
Further, had the circuit court found that a particular document fell under an exemption to the public information act, the Court of Special Appeals ruled that the circuit court was required to determine whether any portion of the document could be severed from the larger whole and released.
The Court of Special Appeals also found that documents relating to an internal law enforcement investigation are not rendered exempt from disclosure under the act by the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights, which creates protections that apply only to the context of an internal investigation, and have no bearing on the public’s right to information.
ralejandro@afro.com
