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Teenager Wins Email Suit Against City of Kokomo
An anonymous reader writes "Recently, a 16 year old sued the city of Kokomo, Indiana for access to an email list that he suspected the mayor was mis-using for political purposes. Despite the mayor's refusal to give in, the teenager won the case. The city will have to pay not only for the expensive attorneys they hired, but may have to compensate the 16 year old's pro-bono counsel."
Much worse misusing of lists has occurred in Indiana. Before the national "do not call list" was implemented Indiana had one. Charitable organizations did not have to oblige by this list. But the FOP took it one step further, adding all the names on the "do not call list" to their call list. This undoubtedly led to them getting more than a few unlisted numbers in the process.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
In this case its more like a bet. If he lost, he got nothing. The boy wouldn't have to pay, no money gained. But if he won, all the lawyers expensives (paralegals, all those billable hours/minutes/seconds) get a value assigned to them, and under the rules of the law, can be paid by the city, which lost. I think.
Kokomo.. didn't the Eagles sing something about that.. or was that somewhere in hawaii?
First off, please don't /. my local newspaper. Secondly this is only one of Matt McKillip's blunders. He has commented how he thinks divorce should be illegal in the city of Kokomo, had a "prayer chapel" installed in a Redi-Med type medical center to prevent a bar from being turned into a strip club, given top jobs to campaign contibutors, changed traditionally public meetings to invite only, etc ...
Really, he is the worst mayor we have had here for quite a while. Delphi and Chrysler, Kokomo's top employers have both recently laid off people. Kokomo is on a downfall and MAtt McKillip isn't helping it.
"City officials turned down Nees, saying the teen could come in and hand-copy the list. Officials said giving out copies of address lists would leave the newsletter subscribers open to spam and computer viruses."
I know it would've been a major pain to hand copy, but if this was a real effort by the teen to research and uncover abuse, why not just copy them down? I mean this has taken over a year now. He could have hand copied them and been done with it long before now.
"Murray said the law, which restricts access to mailing addresses, doesn't extend to e-mail addresses..."
This tells me that the City wasn't asking the teen to hand copy the addresses just to be jerks about it. They were applying an existing law for mailing addresses to email addresses. Seems reasonable to me.
"Groth took the case on a pro-bono basis, but Murray asked for an accounting of Groth's fees in her ruling. Groth said Tuesday it's likely he could bill several thousand dollars for the case."
Before we attack the bloodsucking lawyer, the compensation for the pro-bono part of this was the judges idea. This goes to show that we probably need some way of reeling in some of these justices. I mean, it's one thing if she wants to pay this lawyer out of her pocket, but she just imposed a huge bill on the tax payers of that city to pay someone who was fine doing this for free (free meaning the publicity).
Do what is right and let the consequence follow
actually, it's "pro bono publico"-- since the adjective (publico) modifies the object (bono) of the preposition (pro), it must agree in case (in this case, ablative).
I might not know a lick about C syntax, but I can certainly remember my Latin....
This isn't the first round between McKillip and Nees. Nees had previously created a documentary film about McKillip entitled Words of Sedition: how the highest levels of power shut down free speech in Kokomo.
You can find more info on this case from when it was filed in this Indianapolis Star article.
You can also read more about it on Nees' personal website.
You can watch Words of Sedition online as well.