Call a right “enshrined” all you want, but if a judge decides it’s better to protect law enforcement officers from their own actions than to allow the public to view killings performed in the name of “public safety,” the public gets nothing. Neither do the people serving the public and providing them with information, like the Ocala Gazette, which was recently hit with an order forbidding them from publishing a jailhouse video it had legally obtained.
In 2022, Marion County (Florida) deputies killed Scott Whitley, a mentally ill inmate, during a furious bout of excessive force deployment.
Here’s how the Ocala Gazette described what reporters saw on the jailhouse video:
The guards managed to get him face down on the ground, get a hold of his arms and legs, and continue to tase him. Whitley was no longer resisting them, but continued to scream “please,” and asked the guards to stop tasing him.
About two minutes passed and the guards continued to attempt to put Whitley into handcuffs while they deployed tasers. Four guards had their body weight on top of Whitley’s back as they held him down. He was being tased simultaneously by at least two guards who were standing at his head and feet.
The pepper foam deployed caused Whitley and the guards to cough throughout the entirety of the incident. Whitley continuously screamed in pain and pleaded with the guards and asked them to stop.
At about 7:07 a.m., Whitley could be heard screaming, “Please, somebody help me.” At this point, the tasing stopped as both of his arms were handcuffed about 30 seconds later. A guard outside the cell offered the deputies another taser, which they declined.
But that wasn’t the end of it, as Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella notes in his coverage of the ruling:
The guards put Whitley in handcuffs and leg irons, shoved a spit mask over his head, and continued to hold him down for several minutes until he stopped breathing. When they discovered he was unconscious, they dragged him out of his cell and waited six minutes to call 911.
So far, it’s pretty much any “death in custody,” as law enforcement officials refer to these killings as. But the Ocala Gazette wanted to publish the video it had obtained because it undercut the narrative provided by Marion County Jail officials. Officials claimed Whitley refused to “comply” with guards’ orders, but the recording shows Whitley sitting as ordered to before being rushed by guards who proceeded to brutalize him for the next several minutes.
Multiple journalists attempted to obtain the jailhouse recording of this incident (including Reason and the Ocala Gazette). Their requests were rejected by the Marion County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), which claimed the recording was exempt from disclosure because it might “reveal” the jail’s “safety vulnerabilities.”
That’s a pretty weird claim to make, considering the MCSO is charged with ensuring the jail doesn’t actually have “safety vulnerabilities.” In addition, the MCSO claimed the footage was protected under another law — one that wasn’t written with the intent of shielding law enforcement officers from the consequences of their actions. Back to Ciaramella:
The Marion County Sheriff’s Office also invoked Marsy’s Law, a statute intended to protect the privacy of crime victims, to hide the identities of six of the jail deputies involved in Whitley’s death. The MCSO claimed the deputies were in fact victims of crimes Whitley had inflicted on them.
The supposed crime? “Resisting an officer with violence” — a claim the MSCO could only make as long as no one but law enforcement remained privy to the contents of the recording. But that excuse to keep the public in the dark would seem doomed to fail because the state’s Supreme Court ruled last December this law could not be used to protect cops from accountability. Of course, the MSCO raised this argument roughly a year before this ruling, so there’s a chance this court could find it applied at that date (even though the state court ruling suggests the application of its decision should be retroactive).
Not that it matters here. The ruling [PDF] doesn’t even discuss the invocation of the state’s Marsy’s Law. Instead, it simply decides the MSCO is justified in declaring the footage off limits because it may or may not reveal some sort of jailhouse security vulnerability. Judge James Baxley says the law favors the paper in terms of a presumption of disclosure under the First Amendment, but then says the jail’s presumptive security concerns are more important than the paper’s enshrined rights.
This Court is cognizant of the security concerns of Defendants, and disclosure of the footage could be used to exploit weaknesses within the Marion County Jail’s security systems. However, this Court is also cognizant of the constitutional commitment to open government, and the scales are weighed heavily in favor of disclosure. This Court finds that the Plaintiff has established good cause, and the exception applies here. Nonetheless, the security concerns must be considered even when good cause is show to reach a desirable equilibrium. This Court finds, based on the good cause exception, that Plaintiff’s interests would be met by the inspection of the footage. On the other hand, taking Defendants’ security concerns into account, disclosure to the public at large would be inappropriate.
This is not a “desirable equilibrium.” This is a ruling that allows the Sheriff’s Office to continue to control the narrative, at least to a certain degree. The Ocala Gazette can describe the footage, but without being given the opportunity to share that footage with readers, the MSCO can continue to claim the footage doesn’t depict what the reporters have described. And since it can’t be forced to disclose the footage to the public itself, it can spend the rest of forever claiming the recording the public isn’t allowed to see has been misinterpreted.
The correct ruling would be one that allows disclosure to the public. If the MSCO wants to continue to claim this killing is justified, it should be legally forced to support its argument by publicly releasing the footage. As for the paper, it still has the option of publishing the recording and dealing with any contempt rulings that might arise from that action. But, as it stands now, the jail has secured an unearned win simply by claiming footage of an attack on an inmate that occurred in a single cell somehow would compromise the overall security of the facility.