Lawyers for the city of Aurora opened their latest argument in a privacy rights lawsuit with a quote from a 2017 John Grisham novel.
The city cited something a character said on page 69 of “Camino Island.”
“Elaine was right — nothing is really private these days with the internet and social media and hackers everywhere and all the talk about transparency,” begins the city’s latest filing asking a judge to dismiss a federal lawsuit on behalf of seven current and former police officers who say the city shouldn’t have released their personal information to a gang associate their work helped put in prison.
While acknowledging the author’s latest best-seller is fiction, the city stated the quote accurately sums up the case — in which the officers are suing the city and its former records manager for mailing largely unredacted personnel files in October 2015 to an inmate at Menard Correctional Center in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Representatives from Grisham’s publisher, Doubleday Books, could not be reached Monday.
The officers said putting their private, personal and protected information in the hands of a violent felon with a network of gang associates placed the officers and their families in danger, causing them emotional distress and prompting them to spend money on security measures.
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But the city is arguing the constitution grants no right to privacy for the types of information released.
Information available online, and whether that affects individual privacy rights, has become a focal point of proceedings in the lawsuit, filed in July in U.S. District Court. The officers’ complaint demands a jury trial and seeks a variety of damages.
In court documents, the city admitted that in late 2016, officers were told their information including home addresses, Social Security numbers, phone numbers and family members had been given to at least one incarcerated felon associated with the upper levels of a “particularly violent” street gang.
The city has also argued information released to the prisoner is public record and readily available online.
Lawyers for the officers have called that argument “misguided” and noted Illinois Department of Corrections inmates don’t have access to the internet. In turn, the city’s latest reply argues that inmates can just ask free people they know to look things up for them.
“Whatever the scope of a claimed right to informational privacy,” the city argues, “it cannot include a right to protect information which is not private.”
While the officers’ lawyers contend the city couldn’t just search for their Social Security numbers, defense attorneys argue disclosing a person’s Social Security number still doesn’t violate a constitutional privacy right. The city also refutes many other claims in the lawsuit, including that it took no timely or effective action to remedy harm caused to all the officers and their families, and maintains their actions did not constitute state-created danger.
Meredith Buckley and Seth Halpern, of Chicago-based law firm Malkinson & Halpern, filed the suit on behalf of the seven current and former officers or investigators, and their spouses and children.
John Murphey and Amber Samuelson, of Rosenthal, Murphey, Coblentz & Donahue, are representing both the city and former records manager Jo Ann Osberg in the case.
Six of the officers’ personnel files were released in response to the same Freedom of Information Act request, according to court documents: John Munn, Darrell Moore, Marco Gomez, Armando Montemayor, Arturo Montemayor and Leonard Casamassimo. As of early November, they all still worked for the city.
A March 2017 audit of the city’s FOIA response procedures revealed other times when unredacted personnel files were also disclosed to felons, including an incident involving the seventh officer involved in the lawsuit, Michael Nilles, according to court documents. He is retired, according to the city.
Jesse Alvarez, an inmate at Menard, asked for information on officers who worked his case, saying he was pursuing a type of appeal known as postconviction relief and doing an “investigation” on all officers, detectives, prosecutors and judges involved, according to records obtained through a FOIA request.
Convicted of attempted murder, Alvarez was sentenced in March 2014 to 88 years in the Illinois prison system for shooting and trying to kill a rival street gang member in 2009.
The city and Osberg filed a motion in September asking the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, stating in a supplementary filing that there’s “no substantive due process right to ‘informational privacy.'”
Defense attorneys said they did public records searches of the officers and provided a list of information found online about each.
The officers’ lawyers said the internet isn’t necessarily a reliable source and some of the websites that defense lawyers used contain inaccuracies. Even if some information released is publicly available through other sources, that doesn’t cancel the officers’ privacy rights, they argued.