Miami-Dade County’s State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle is censoring at least 100 of her critics on Twitter, including a dozen accounts either named Darren Rainey or with the deceased man’s profile image.
We have pictures to prove it.
It all started when the prosecutor sent a tweet about freedom.
The City of Homestead has a torrid reputation and a pattern of willfully refusing to comply with the public records law. Homestead is a little town at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, rarely receiving the scrutiny it deserves as a cesspool of public corruption and maleficence.
I have used the records request process, as a pre-discovery method for investigating my civil rights claims. Homestead has failed to comply with the public records law on the majority of the nearly one hundred requests I have filed.
A Missouri police association filed a lawsuit against the city of Columbia, accusing its police department of violating the state’s public records law by refusing to provide records in a timely manner, then charging an exorbitant amount for the requested records.
Last summer, the Columbia Police Officers’ Association requested two months worth of email correspondence between Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton and Deputy Chief of Police Jill Schlude.
The City of Miami Beach just asked the Miami Herald for almost $73,000 to hire one of their employees for a year, just to deliver public records documents related to “human-source fecal marker” and water quality.
Behind closed doors in secret meetings, an attorney for a Florida school board appears to have met with a local state attorney in the hopes to pursue felony criminal charges against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray.
According to emails recently obtained through a public records request, it was revealed that St. Johns County School Board Frank Upchurch III planned a meeting with State Attorney R.J. Larizza in the hopes of keeping Gray from exercising his Constitutional rights to record public officials as well as to obtain public records.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — When the editor of a gay-oriented newspaper in Florida requested records that he thought should be public, he cast a wide net, asking that the police emails of every employee of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office be searched for specific gay slurs over a five-month period.
UPDATE III – March 15th, 3:30pm – Jeff Gray has been released, finally, from St. Johns County Jail. Here is his statement
“I am out of jail and safely at home. I walked out of jail around 1pm today 3/15/16. I was treated well by SJSO Jail staff. I want to thank everybody for their support and calls to the jail. Word got back to me that the phone lines were melting.”
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As addressed in my recent article, the Florida League of Cities is pushing for a dramatic and unwarranted change to Florida’s Public Records Act for which no empirical justification is offered.
PINAC reporter Jeff Gray conducted a public records audit at the town hall of Penney Farms last month, a tiny town in North Florida known more for its retirement community than its farms that describes itself as “one of the best kept secrets” in the state.
And judging by town clerk Anita Cooper’s refusal to comply with one of his request, it’s certainly living up to that promise.
The basic premise of Florida’s Public Records Act is that the public has a right to access any records dealing with official government business. Its purpose is to promote public awareness and knowledge of government actions to ensure the government remains accountable to the people.
