Challenging government secrecy can put hole in people's pocketbooks

By EMILY LE COZ and GEOFF PENDER - NORTHEAST MISSISSIPPI DAILY JOURNAL and SUN HERALD

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TUPELO -- If someone steals your car in Mississippi, you call the police. If someone defrauds you, you call the attorney general.

But if someone denies you access to public records, no taxpayer-funded agency will help you. Instead, you hire an attorney.

In Mississippi, a state with a long history of government secrecy, it can be difficult, expensive, time consumingand sometimes an all but impossibleto know what government leaders are up to and what special interests pull their strings.

Story: Mississippi open-government laws full of exemptions that allow secrecy

That's because enforcement of the state's Public Records Act and Open Meetings Act falls not on the shoulders of the state, but on those of the public itself.

"Who makes sure what is public is public?" asks Tom Wicker, media lawyer and attorney for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. "The public does."

The problem, adds First Amendment specialist and Jackson-based attorney Leonard Van Slyke, is that Mississippi has very little enforcement of its own public-access laws.

"Essentially," he said, "if the public body denies your request, you're forced to go to court to get relief. There is no ombudsman or no ability to get the district attorney or the attorney general to enforce it."

That's what Pass Christian resident Tut Kinney discovered several years ago. He and his neighbors were denied access to information about Harrison County's plans to locate a huge rock and gravel distribution plant near their homes.

When Kinney, a lawyer, felt the Harrison County Development Commission was wrongly withholding the information, he sued the agency.

Eventually, he won. But it wasn't easy. It cost Kinney thousands of dollars and untold hours of work over five years. The development commission even filed a lawsuit against Kinney after he requested public records, some of which, it came out in court, the agency shredded after his request.

Such cases illustrate why Mississippi ranks near the bottom in recent independent surveys about openness in government.

On the surface, Mississippi's campaign-finance, ethics, Public Records and Open Meetings rules appear solid. But in practice, they are almost never enforced. Even if they are, the penalties are mild: The maximum fine a judge can impose is $100, plus all reasonable expenses incurred by those who brought the suit. But there's no guarantee the judge will do that. In fact, it's unlikely, experts said.

"I've never seen a fine imposed in any (open meetings/records) cases I've had," said longtime media lawyer Henry Laird, attorney for the Sun Herald. "I've had probably two or three dozen cases."