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NewsLeader - Governor's lawyers have lost their way - and badly | 1 comment (1 topical, 0 hidden)
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by Press on Tue Nov 06, 2007 at 04:07:09 AM EST
From Sunday's Springfield News-Leader and St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

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Attorney speaks out about being fired
Tony Messenger, Springfield News-Leader
Sunday, October 28

Scott Eckersley didn't have to be a particularly experienced attorney to figure out that the business of the state of Missouri was intended to be conducted in public. 

That Eckersley had to point out this concept to his co-workers at the governor's office, however, makes his situation particularly unique. 

Eckersley is the former deputy counsel for Gov. Matt Blunt. Until a few weeks ago, he was in charge of responding to Sunshine Law requests made to the governor's office. 

Eckersley received such a request from me in early September. I asked for e-mails that Blunt's chief of staff, Ed Martin, had sent from his work e-mail account seeking to rally private groups' support for kicking Attorney General Jay Nixon off a case defending a lawsuit against the state. I had one of these e-mails, so I was surprised that my Sunshine Law request came back from the governor's office saying no such e-mails existed. The column that followed spurred weeks of stories across the Missouri press because Martin admitted to deleting e-mails, the governor himself was quoted as saying that e-mails weren't public records, and a governor's office that talked a big game about openness ended up with egg on their faces. 

It didn't have to be that way. 

Around the time Blunt, Martin, and spokesman Rich Chrismer were publicly telling the press that e-mails are not public records, Eckersley says he was privately pointing Martin and anybody who would listen to the governor's e-mail retention policy. That policy says e-mails are public records and indicates a schedule for how long they are to be maintained -- at least a year in most cases. It's clear from the public statements made by Martin, Chrismer and Blunt that the policy wasn't being followed. 

Eckersley read the policy. He read the contradictory public statements. He didn't understand why nobody would listen to him. 

Now he does. They didn't want to listen. Within weeks of pointing out the governor's own policy to those he worked with, Eckersley was shown the door by the governor's chief of staff.

"I kept pushing it," Eckersley says now. "There's no question in my mind that I was retaliated against as a result of that." 

Through a spokeswoman, Martin refused to comment for this column, but the state has plenty to say about Eckersley and his firing in documents provided to the News-Leader. 

Read the full article

Blunt lawyer claims fired because questioned office handling of emails 
Jo Mannies, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sunday, Oct. 28 2007 

A former lawyer in Gov. Matt Blunt's office says he was fired last month after he raised questions about how the governor's staff was handling office e-mails and public records requests.

Scott Eckersley's dismissal came at a time when the governor and his staff were under fire for saying e-mails on state computers were not necessarily public records. They also acknowledged that office e-mails were being routinely deleted.

The stance seemed to contradict Missouri law, which requires that many state government communications, paper or electronic, be stored for up to three years. Legal experts say e-mails are a vital record of how government decisions 
are made.

Eckersley, Blunt's former deputy counsel, said in an interview Saturday that he had researched state law and emphasized verbally and in e-mails to Blunt's staff that the governor's office had a written policy specifying how electronic messages and other public records were to be saved.

E-mails from Blunt staffers have been the subject of records requests from news media outlets, and they have sometimes been rejected because, staffers say, the e-mails were deleted.

"I believed I was fired for pointing to written office policy which ... contradicted how the office was handling record requests," Eckersley said. 

Read the full article

NewsLeader - Governor's lawyers have lost their way - and badly | 1 comment (1 topical, 0 hidden)
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