Hearing on e-mail leaves questions to be answered

By Staff
Clif Knight, Hartselle Enquirer
Two lawsuits dealing with the e-mails of Morgan County’s elected and appointed officials and their employees received mixed decisions from Circuit Judge Steve Haddock.
In a special hearing last week, Haddock dismissed without prejudice a lawsuit brought by Sheriff Greg Bartlett against the Morgan County Commission. Bartlett sought to prevent the commission from releasing the e-mails on servers in his department. He also requested permission to retrieve his department’s e-mails from the county’s main server and put them on a new server under his control.
Haddock said the sheriff’s office is established by state law as a unique position, however, he said a newly adopted policy for the handling of requests for public records gives the sheriff the authority to decide which records are public and which ones are not.
As to Bartlett’s request to have his own e-mail server, Haddock said that’s not a question for the court to decide. He suggested the plaintiff might consider seeking an attorney general’s opinion or a change in the open records law through the state legislature.
In response to a lawsuit initiated by District 4 Commissioner Stacy George, Haddock said he was going to modify a temporary restraining order to prevent the defendants, Commission Chairman John Glasscock, District 1 Commissioner Jeff Clark and Data Processing Director David Hannah, from destroying public records, taking into account the adoption of a policy to deal with the release of e-mail records.
He also indicated he would craft an order in writing that sets out the claims in the case and make a decision on the temporary injunction he awarded to George last month. He said both parties would have 30 days to respond to his order.
George’s attorney, Hubert Porter, petitioned the court Feb. 2 for a restraining order to protect the integrity of e-mails that were involved in an investigation conducted by the commission in January George decided to seek legal recourse when he was refused access to a disc containing about 250,000 e-mails by Glasscock, Clark and Hannah. Later, he claimed some of the e-mails that were subject to the investigation were erased or destroyed and sought permission to conduct an inventory to determine which ones were missing. He also filed a damage claim of $9,000 against the three defendants to recover his legal expenses.
Haddock pressed Porter to show evidence that the three defendants had done anything to cause e-mails to be missing, His response was Hannah had indicated that some e-mails were missing.
Porter said George’s concern stems from his being denied access to the e-mails. He proposed that his client be allowed access to the disc with the understanding that elected officials and department heads would have the opportunity to remove any that are protected under the open records law.
Porter replied that his client would be willing to do that if it was necessary.