CFAC announces awards to FOES and friends of free speech, open government. “Darkness Awards” zap Orange County judge, Capistrano school board, San Bernardino assessor
The California First Amendment Coalition has named the 2008 recipients of its “Darkness Award,” given in recognition of conduct that thwarts freedom of speech and the public’s right to know. The awards, to be presented Saturday, October 18 at UC Berkeley, are given to:
— Orange County Superior Court Judge David C. Velasquez, who attempted to bar the Orange County Register from covering public testimony in a lawsuit against the paper. His attempt to impose government censorship in the form of a prior restraint was quickly knocked down by the Court of Appeal.
— San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus, a former chairman of the Board of Supervisors who: 1) refused to disclose his activities and e-mails during a two-week period when wildfires raged in the county, 2) as assessor hired an “executive support staff” that, according to the Grand Jury, did “public image work for him, and 3) employed an aide who is being prosecuted by the District Attorney for alleged destruction of public records.
— The Capistrano Unified School Board, which was so indifferent to anti-secrecy laws that the Orange County District Attorney issued a public report outlining the board’s many violations of the Ralph M. Brown public meetings law. In a follow-up inquiry, the District Attorney found further violations and concluded that the board had proven itself “incapable or unwilling” of complying with the law.
In contrast to the Darkness Awards, CFAC also today named the 2008 winners of awards that affirmatively honor service in the cause of free speech, open government and the public’s right to know. Attorney Hal Fuson, the Chauncey Bailey Project, the San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch, and legislative advocate Jim Ewert are being recognized for their dedication to First Amendment principles.
–Hal Fuson, vice president and chief legal counsel of Copley Press, will receive the annual Bill Farr Award, presented jointly by CFAC and the California Society of Newspaper Editors. The award recognizes Fuson’s career-long contributions to the principles of free speech, free press and public access to government.
–The Chauncey Bailey Project and the San Francisco Chronicle will receive CFAC’s Beacon Award. The Chauncey Bailey Project, representing 25 journalists from multiple Bay Area news organizations and journalism schools, produced more than 140 stories that illuminated the circumstances around the 2007 assassination of Chauncey Bailey, an editor for the Oakland Post who was investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery. Working independently but likewise relying heavily on public records, the San Francisco Chronicle generated 103 stories and probed deeply into the case.
–Linda Deutsch, the legendary court reporter for the Association Press, is a Beacon Award winner. Ms. Deutsch has not only brought some of the nation’s most celebrated trials to our doorsteps, she has fought valiantly for openness and press freedom, earning among other things the Society of Professional Journalists’ First Amendment Award.
–Jim Ewert, legal counsel and legislative advocate for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, is being honored with a Beacon Award. Ewert is in his second decade of protecting reporters, standing up to censorship, and elevating the rights of student journalists and their advisers.
The awards will be presented at CFAC’s annual Free Speech and Open Government Assembly, to be held this Friday and Saturday at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The award presentation is on Saturday. The program and free online registration are available here:
http://www.cfac.org/content/index.php/cfac-assembly/index/
The full citations for all awards follow.
2008 DARKNESS AWARDS:
Superior Court Judge David C. Velasquez
Sometimes judges let their power go to their heads. Sometimes judges, with all their power, lose their heads. And sometime both happen at the same time, as in the case of Orange County Superior Court Judge David C. Velasquez.
Judge Velasquez is presiding over a class action lawsuit against the Orange County Register involving claims by newspaper delivery workers that they were illegally denied “employee” status (and the benefits that go with it). On Sept. 19, the judge issued an order barring all parties to the case–which, of course, includes The Register–from reporting on testimony given at the trial.
A court injunction forbidding a news organization from publishing is called a “prior restraint.” In First Amendment jurisprudence, prior restraints are at the top of the list of things that courts may not do because they are a form of official censorship. Except in the most extreme circumstances–like revealing the location of US troops during a war–prior restraints are unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s free speech and free press guarantees.
Judge Velasquez’s order was so clearly invalid that it took the Court of Appeal only ten days—the speed of light, in judicial velocity–to review the parties’ briefs and issue its own unanimous decision overturning the prior restraint against the Register. The decision said that the rationale for Judge Velasquez’s order ” cannot possibly justify the censorship imposed.”
For his refusal to adhere to First Amendment principles, the California First Amendment Coalition hereby presents a “Darkness Award” to Judge Velasquez. Together with a trophy and this citation, we are also sending the judge the US Constitution, since he apparently has lost his copy.
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Bill Postmus, San Bernardino County Assessor
San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus wins one of CFAC’s 2008 “Darkness” awards for extraordinary resistance to openness in government.
Postmus was the central figure in a Public Records Act lawsuit brought by the San Bernardino Sun and CFAC claiming that he should have disclosed calendars and e-mails relating to a two-week period in the summer of 2006 when fires raged in the county and Postmus, then the chairman of the Board
of Supervisors, was absent. While other members of the Board of Supervisors agreed to disclose their calendars, Postmus resisted at taxpayer expense.
But it doesn’t stop there. This year, the county Grand Jury blasted Postmus for hiring an “executive support staff” which “lacked experience or training directly associated with assessor work.” The Grand Jury said Postmus’ people, many of whom had been with him on the Board of Supervisors and/or was Republican Central Committee chairman, did “public image work” and political activities on the job.
The capper, though, was the criminal charge against Postmus’ 25-year-old aide, Adam Aleman, for alleged destruction of public records. The DA alleges that Aleman destroyed the hard drive of a laptop computer that had been issued by the county to Postmus when Postmus was on the Board of Supervisors.
Since Postmus’ activities and/or e-mails during a crucial time when fire raged may never see the light of day, and Postmus used county lawyers to fight against sunshine, he wins CFAC’s 2008 Darkness award.
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Capistrano Unified School Board
Local government legislative bodies–city councils, boards of supervisors, and school boards–are required by California’s Brown Act to conduct their business mostly in public sessions; to give advance notice of issues to be raised at these meetings; and to allow for public participation.
But there are some agencies that think the Brown Act’s requirements are just recommendations, or that the law doesn’t really apply to them. Among these Brown Act scofflaws, the Capistrano Unified School Board stands out for its truly exceptional dedication to excessive government secrecy and indifference to the law.
In October 2007 the Orange County District Attorney concluded an investigation of the school board with a public report excoriating the board for multiple Brown Act violations, including repeated misuse and abuse of the board’s limited authority to meet in executive session; misleading or missing agenda items; failure to report actions after executive sessions, and more.
You would think the Capistrano trustees might learn from their mistakes. But no. The District Attorney’s office, reporting on a follow-up inquiry, told the Board last month that it had found still more Brown Act violations, including an executive session debate and decision on a raise for the schools’ superintendant–which should have occurred in an open, public meeting. The DA concluded that the
board had shown itself “incapable or unwilling” to comply with the law.
The DA’s September report offers a rare glimpse of the deliberations of the board in closed, executive sessions, (which the Capistrano school board records on audiotape, although the tapes are not made public.) In a closed a session in February to discuss an employment contract for the schools superintendent, three board members argued that a proposed $58,000 raise was too high. According to the DA, “When one of the [dissenting] trustees indicated that the constituents of [the school district] would be unhappy with the proposed increase . . . , trustee Marlene Draper commented, ‘It’s not about them,’ and pushed forward the vote approving the new, more lucrative contract offer.”
Capistrano voters, fed up with their school Board’s recidivism in Brown Act violations, have taken matters into their own hands, replacing three of the seven board members in a regular election in 2006, and replacing two more in a recall election in June 2008, including Ms. (” It’s not about them”) Draper. With majority control of the school board now in the hands of reform-minded members ostensibly committed to transparency and accountability, one can hope that this is not only the first Darkness Award given to the Capistrano Unified School Board, but also the last.
2008 BILL FARR AWARD:
Hal Fuson is a First Amendment hero with a sense of humor. In his book, “Telling It All,” he writes a disclaimer about its legal advice, noting, “A second opinion is useful, especially if a lawyer can be enticed to offer one for free.”
It is perhaps this disarming quality that has made Fuson such an effective leader for the media and the public in his more than 40 years in journalism.
He has been guided by a belief that he outlined in his book on freedom of expression: “The First Amendment is not just a negative statement but implies a degree of affirmative constitutional protection for news gathering and speech related activities.”
Hal Fuson’s credentials as a First Amendment star are too long to detail in this citation. He has served on multiple boards, won many awards, served as attorney pushing for access rights, guided strategies for legislation to remove the information clamps, and helped his colleagues on these kinds of missions not only in California but the rest of the country.
One organization that has benefited from his support and wisdom is the California First Amendment Coalition, and not infrequently at these very Assemblies.
Hal’s current title is Executive Vice President and chief operating officer for The Copley Press, the publishers of the San Diego Union Tribune. In his professional career he has been a journalist and a journalism teacher in Illinois and Texas.
But the Fuson story we embrace is the one in California. He has served as a First Amendment attorney at the Los Angeles Times before moving to Copley. He is vice-president of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, most importantly serves on its public affairs committee, where he helped shoulder through Prop. 59 and other important public access laws as well as fighting off the ones that called for blackouts.
He has authored the reporter-friendly book on media law, called Telling It All—A Legal Guide to the Exercise of Free speech. He has won FOI awards and honors from Cal Press, as well as the Media Law Resource Center and the Illinois Press Association. He has served as chair of the Media Law Resource Center and a director of the Newspaper Association of America.
But a recitation of boards, awards and titles does not do him justice. Everyone likes Hal Fuson. He is witty and he is clear-headed. He is modest and eloquent. That is why he has been able to do so much good on behalf of the public and the media.
It is for his lifetime of work and his character that the California First Amendment Coalition and the California Society of Newspaper Editors award to Harold Fuson Jr., the 2008 Bill Farr Award.
BEACON AWARDS:
Chauncey Bailey Project and San Francisco Chronicle
About 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 2, 2007, a man in a ski mask with a sawed off shotgun pumped three shots into Chauncey Bailey as he walked to his newsroom at the Oakland Post.
The shots that killed the Post editor were heard around the country. They aimed at stopping him and his paper from its investigation into Your Black Muslim Bakery and the Bey family that owned it.
Instead of stopping the investigation, the murder prompted an unprecedented journalistic show of force in the Bay Area — the biggest since journalists came from all over the country to investigate the murder of reporter Don Bolles 22 years ago in Phoenix.
More than 25 journalists from several rival news organizations and two journalism schools joined forces to complete Bailey’s work. It was a remarkable collaboration that produced more than 140 stories and several multi-media projects on its website.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle, working independently, generated 103 stories of its own, demonstrating that the public benefits from both collaboration and competition on important news stories.
Just as the East Bay Express dug deep into the dubious workings of Your Black Muslim Bakery five years ago, the Chauncey Bailey Project and the Chronicle exposed the conditions in Oakland that allowed the Bey family to flourish and that led to Bailey’s death.
The California First Amendment Coalition is pleased to bestow its Beacon award upon the Chauncey Bailey project and the San Francisco Chronicle for courageously pursuing this story in the best tradition of journalism and social justice.
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Linda Deutsch
Her name is synonymous with some of the most celebrated trials in America: Charles Manson, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Patty Hearst and Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood, just to mention a few.
For more than 40 years Linda Deutsch has been bringing the courtroom to the people with her countless stories as an Associated Press reporter.
In doing so she has fought valiantly for openness and press freedom. A winner of the Society of Professional Journalists’ First Amendment award, she has promoted the cause of press freedom in articles, speeches and interviews.
For her distinguished career of achievement on behalf of the First Amendment, the California First Amendment Coalition is proud to present Linda Deutsch with its annual Beacon Award.
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Jim Ewert
Jim Ewert is perhaps the only First Amendment lawyer who also can claim experience as a high school wrestling coach. It’s fitting, given that Jim has wrestled so much important legislation into shape in his 12 years as the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s legal counsel and legislative advocate.
Thanks to Jim’s efforts, high school and college journalism advisers have new legal protections against discipline for standing up to censorship of school publications. College students have assurance that they can speak and write freely without fear of school discipline. Due to his persistent, skillful advocacy, Californians now enjoy the benefits of public, online disclosure of campaign finance information reports by candidates for state office.
Because of his important contributions to openness, the California First Amendment Coalition is proud to present Jim Ewert with a 2008 Beacon Award.
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Contact: Peter Scheer, executive director
California First Amendment Coalition
534 4th St., Suite B
San Rafael, CA 94901
Phone: (415) 460.5060
Cell: (415) 505.5024
E-mail: ps@cfac.org