YAKIMA — The Washington state Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of a Yakima newspaper’s quest for access to an estimated $2 million in billing records for court-appointed attorneys in a 2005 murder case.
The Yakima Herald-Republic had argued that the public has a clear interest in knowing how the money was spent. Yakima County countered that it couldn’t turn over the documents because they were sealed by a judge.
Court records are exempt from the state Public Records Act, but only when they are exclusively held by the courts, the court said in a unanimous 9-0 ruling. Court records held by other agencies, in this case Yakima County, are not exempt.
The case involves legal fees and other expenses that court-appointed lawyers incurred defending Jose Luis Sanchez Jr. and Mario Gil Mendez in a 2005 home-invasion shooting that left two people dead, including a 3-year-old girl. Mendez pleaded guilty; Sanchez is appealing his conviction and life sentence after a 2007 trial.
Taxpayer-funded defense costs in the murder case totaled $560,000 for Mendez and $1.5 million for Sanchez.
The defendants had a legal right to representation at public expense, and the newspaper waited until the trial court proceedings were concluded before asking for the records, said Bob Crider, editor of the Yakima Herald-Republic.
“Our argument was that the public, which paid for that defense, had a right to know how that money was spent,” he said. “We’re hoping that this will lead to some more transparency, and that it will send a message to the legal system throughout the state that the Public Records Act cannot be ignored.”
The county’s lawyer, Ken Harper, did not immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment.
A judge assigned to oversee spending by defense attorneys in the murder case had placed the billing records under seal. But copies of the documents were apparently sent to the county auditor and board of commissioners so the lawyers could be paid.
The newspaper asked the high court to review its case seeking billing records for Sanchez. An appeals court upheld the newspaper’s stance on billings records for Mendez, but the decision was appealed to the state Supreme Court.
The high court previously ruled in a separate case that the judiciary is exempt from disclosure requirements of the Public Records Act. But this case presented some new questions for the justices: Was the sealing of the administrative and financial court records proper, and must a government agency comply with the Public Records Act if it has copies of documents that also happen to be in a sealed court file?
The high court rejected the newspaper’s argument that the billing records were administrative, rather than judicial, in nature, and it ruled that the trial court should determine whether the decision to seal the financial documents was proper. But the high court found that as a nonjudicial agency, the county violated the Public Records Act when it failed to release the documents.
The court also awarded costs and attorneys fees to the newspaper.
Crider estimated the newspaper’s costs in the “six figures,” but couldn’t provide an exact dollar amount.
“It’s a pretty major victory for open government,” said Michele Earl-Hubbard, lawyer for the newspaper. “The court here has streamlined the process so that hopefully, in the future, the public can gain access to these records.”
Gregory Link, an attorney for Sanchez, had asked the justices to consider his client’s interests, arguing the release of the billing records could reveal defense attorneys’ strategy and thus jeopardize Sanchez’s right to a fair trial. Furthermore, defendants who can afford their own attorneys would never have to reveal such information.
Link did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Two prominent Seattle defense attorneys who were assigned to represent Sanchez in 2005 were kicked off the case in 2006, after a judge found they had acted unethically. The attorney general’s office then investigated and found the attorneys had wasted $1 million of public money and engaged in wrongful conduct, but it found there was not enough evidence to prosecute them.
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