Also tagged University of
Michigan Law School: Q&A: University of Michigan Law School's Jason Burns
to give talk in Saline on human trafficking
Jason Burns, a clinical
fellow at the University of Michigan Law School Human Trafficking Clinic, says
raising community awareness is key in the fight against human trafficking.
He'll be educating the public about the issue ...
The City of Detroit lost
access to records of murders and other crimes that occurred before 2004 because
it failed to pay its bill to a storage company, the Michigan Innocence Clinic
alleges in a lawsuit.
The clinic, a center within
the University of Michigan Law School that investigates cases that may have
resulted in a wrongful conviction, is in the process of settling a suit that
alleges the Detroit Police Department violated the Freedom of Information Act
nine times in the past year.
The lawsuit, which was filed April 19 in the
Washtenaw Circuit Court, claims the department denied FOIA requests because the
city of Detroit hadn’t paid Iron Mountain, the company that manages the police
department’s reports prior to 2004.
The Michigan Innocence
Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School said it has reached a
settlement with Detroit over denial of Freedom of Information Act requests.
Court records indicate the city of Detroit’s
written response to a request of information in the 1999 homicide of Maceo
Vanover read: “The record pertains to a homicide which occurred prior to 2004
and, if the record exists, would be archived at an outside vendor’s storage
facility. Due to non-payment of storage fees, the city is unable to retrieve
any records from the vendor.”
The MIC said it received a
similar written response to requests in eight other homicide cases going back
to 1992.
In a phone conversation on
Sept. 27, 2011, an attorney with the City of Detroit Law Department told a
representative from MIC said the city was locked out of the storage facility
because the city had failed to pay, according to court records.
“That’s not a legitimate
reason to deny a FOIA request,” said Imran Syed, a staff attorney at MIC.
The information the clinic
gleans from old records helps “fill in the missing pieces” in cases in which
the wrong person may be sitting in prison, Syed said.
“One of the biggest ways we
can do that is through the Freedom of Information Act,” he said.
In the lawsuit, the MIC
claims: “The records requested are essential to the plaintiffs’ investigations
of alleged negligence and impropriety in the defendants’ performance of its
public functions … (The) defendants’ police investigation and forensic
laboratory practices have been the subject of highly publicized revelations of
systemic error and fraud.”
The lawsuit goes on to say
that several recent exonerations have shown the Detroit Police Department’s
improper actions have contributed to wrongful convictions of innocent citizens.
The clinic submits a high
number of FOIA requests specifically to the Detroit Police Department because
that’s where many of the homicide cases the clinic investigates occurred, Syed
said.
In its original answer to
the complaint, the city said that its denials of information requests were
“neither arbitrary nor capricious,” as the suit claimed. The city also cited
several Michigan statutes that say the department does not have to disclose
such information, according to court records.
Phone messages left with
the city of Detroit’s Law Department were not returned.
MIC’s attorney, Samuel
Damren said that last week the two parties reached an agreement in the suit.
“I have every reason to
believe the documents will be produced,” Damren said. “I think Detroit and the
storage facility will make a good faith effort.”
When contacted, Iron
Mountain said it does not disclose information about its clients. According to
its website, the company is a global information management service assisting
140,000 organizations in 39 countries on five continents with storing,
protecting and managing information.