In the 55th District Court of Harris County, Texas, IACLS has sued the Harris County District Attorney’s Office over The Office’s attempts to prevent disclosure of several items of public information.

A summary of the case and IACLS’s arguments is in IACLS’s response to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office’s motion for summary judgment:

So far we have discovered that The Office is violating FBI’s rules for storing criminal-history record information (CHRI), specifically Rule 4.2.4, which allows agencies that receive CHRI to store such records for extended periods “only when they are key elements for the integrity and/or utility of case files and/or criminal record files”—something that is definitely not true of the CHRI that The Office admits having stored (along with prospective jurors’ Social Security Numbers and other confidential information) in its training video.

The Office’s slapdash storage of potential jurors’ confidential information looks bad; The Office’s slapdash storage of potential jurors’ CHRI jeopardizes The Office’s access to such information even for more legitimate purposes such as “running defendants’ criminal histories.”

As well as our response to The Office’s motion for summary judgment, today IACLS filed a reply to The Office’s response to IACLS’s motion for a protective order.

In a public-information lawsuit, the burden is on the governmental agency to show that withholding the records is proper. The Texas Rules of Civil Procedure govern the lawsuit, and neither the rules nor any statute allows an ex parte ruling. Even if the rules or the statute allowed it, the Texas Constitution (Article I, section 19, due course of law) would forbid it. The statute allows the trial court to enter a protective order so that the parties can conduct discovery and properly litigate the question of whether the information must be disclosed.

The Office doesn’t want us to see the records, even under a protective order. (If we see them under a protective order and The Office somehow prevails, we can’t share what we’ve learned from the records.) But we don’t see how they can win the lawsuit without providing us with a copy of the records to discuss, either under or without a protective order, so it’d probably be better for them to accede to the protective order.

(This is one of the best—by which I mean “most fun”—things about IACLS’s work, by the way: every special project opens the door to several others. We just wanted to see a training video, and now we’re reporting prosecutors’ violation of FBI rules to the DPS, litigating whether the Texas Constitution allows judgments on secret evidence, and possibly making law that makes it much harder for the state to keep secrets from the People.)

Here’s our reply to the state’s response to our motion for a protective order: