In response to a 7th Circuit decision, overcautious law enforcement departments around the state started redacting basic information from incident reports and citations – information like who committed the crime. We filed a lawsuit and obtained a favorable settlement where the Jefferson Country Sheriff’s Department turned over unredacted records related to an incident where a women vandalized a GOP booth at the county fair.
The U.S. DOJ ignored a FOIA request WILL filed in January 2016 for over 13 months. We were seeking records regarding their fruitless investigation into alleged discrimination by choice schools. After we filed a lawsuit seeking to compel release of those records, they finally turned them over.
The REINS Act requires state agencies to submit proposed regulations to the governor for approval. The Department of Public Instruction has refused to follow that law, so we filed an original action in the supreme court asking it to resolve the issue.
The Wisconsin Assembly has a policy of printing out electronic records and charging requesters on a per-page basis instead of simply sending the files electronically or putting them on a CD or flash drive. We sued Representative Jonathan Brostoff when he tried to charge us over $3,000 for paper copies of emails, arguing that this practice violates the Open Records Law. He turned over the records, waived charges, and paid us our attorney fees.
Wisconsin law requires custodians to respond to record requests “as soon as practicable and without delay.” We sued the Madison Police Department when it delayed responding to a simple record request for over 400 days. It immediately turned over the records.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction issued first preliminary, and then final, federal report cards for the Every Student Succeeds Act to every school district in the state. DPI insisted that school districts “embargo” the report cards and keep them hidden from the public for months, in direct violation of the Open Records Law. DPI didn’t turn over the records it had on the subject, either, so we sued in order to obtain the records.
No results found.