“That’s success from the perspective of Worcester”
Worcester agrees to pay $185,000 after a judge ruled the city acted in bad faith by withholding police misconduct records for years
Before I get into today’s story, I wanted to mention that the Mass Dump now has a Facebook page. Please like and follow here.
Also, today’s story was written for Bill Shaner’s Worcester Sucks and I Love It newsletter. Bill Shaner publishes insightful commentary about Worcester, including plenty of work that’s of interest to Mass Dump readers. He’s written about how the police department has plainclothes units similar to the ones that killed Tyre Nichols in Memphis, the police department’s acquisition of a drone, and police destroying homeless encampments. Subscribe to his newsletter here:
Without further ado, here’s the story...
Worcester has agreed to pay $180,000 in legal fees and $5,000 in punitive damages to the Telegram & Gazette after a judge found that the city acted in bad faith when it forced the newspaper to spend three years in court fighting for access to public records related to police misconduct investigations.
Worcester Superior Court Judge Janet Kenton-Walker found that officials were wrong to withhold the records and ordered the city to pay the T&G’s legal fees and expenses, but she cut the paper’s requested fee award from $217,000 to $101,000.
Jeffrey Pyle, the T&G’s lead attorney on the case, filed an appeal, arguing that Kenton-Walker’s 54 percent cut was excessive and unjustified. A panel of three Appeals Court justices overturned parts of Kenton-Walker’s ruling and returned the case to her to determine a new amount.
However, the city settled out of court, signing an agreement with the T&G on February 21.
Tom Matthews, a spokesperson for the city, declined to comment or to make City Manager Eric D. Batista and City Solicitor Michael Traynor available for interviews.
“The Telegram & Gazette spent more than three years fighting for the right to have access to documents of considerable public interest,” said Michael McDermott, the paper’s executive editor. “I’m proud of reporter Brad Petrishen for pursuing these records and thankful to our lawyers for successfully defending the public's right to know."
In 2018, Petrishen requested several internal-affairs reports and officer complaint histories from the city. The T&G reporter was looking into a voluminous complaint submitted to prosecutors by civil rights lawyer Hector Pineiro, who accused officers of beating people, conducting illegal searches, staging evidence, falsifying reports, and more.
In November, the US Department of Justice announced that it was opening a civil rights investigation to determine whether the Worcester Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of racially discriminatory and gender-biased policing and excessive force. Justice Department officials have not said whether they were influenced by Pineiro’s complaint or the T&G’s reporting.
The city initially agreed to provide the T&G with most of the records but backtracked after the paper published two articles by Petrishen describing what he learned about the allegations from court records. The T&G soon filed a lawsuit — it was the paper’s third successful lawsuit against the city for internal-affairs records in two decades.
“We felt like it was important to write about these things and to try to determine the truth, because that’s really what we care about,” Petrishen said in a 2020 interview with the New England First Amendment Coalition.
The case dragged on for three years, culminating in a four-day trial before Kenton-Walker.
The main argument by Wendy Quinn, the city’s chief litigator at the time, was that the city could withhold the internal-affairs records because the officers who were the subjects of the investigations were facing civil rights lawsuits.
Before the trial started, Quinn attacked Petrishen’s motives for requesting the records, telling a judge the reporter was “working hand in hand” with Pineiro, one of the attorneys suing the police. Quinn admitted she had no evidence of impropriety, but she complained that Petrishen had written about “the self-serving complaints by this attorney … even though they’re speculative and haven’t been proven.”
The trial’s single witness was Janice Thompson, an assistant city solicitor who said she spends most of her time advising officials how to respond to records requests.
Thompson testified that the city’s decision to reverse course and withhold the records had nothing to do with Petrishen’s articles. She said the decision was made after she had a conversation “in passing” with someone from the litigation side of the city’s law department who told her about the civil rights lawsuits. She said that she couldn’t remember who that person was.
Kenton-Walker ruled in the T&G’s favor in June 2021. In January 2022, she further ruled that the city was required to pay the punitive damages and legal fees.
Kenton-Walker wrote that “the city merely cherry-picked certain language from [previous] cases, taking it out of context” to justify its arguments. She advised that “counsel may not misrepresent to the court what cases and other materials stand for.”
Kenton-Walker also wrote that another one of the city’s arguments — that the conclusions of internal-affairs investigations are private personnel records — was rejected by the Appeals Court in a 2003 opinion in the T&G’s first public records lawsuit against the city. Kenton-Walker said she couldn’t ignore the fact that the city had been aware of this precedent.
During the oral arguments related to the legal-fees issue, Appeals Court Justice John Englander also slammed the city’s conduct.
“I have to say, having a little experience in that position, I can understand the judge’s concern over the good faith of [the city’s argument],” he told Quinn.
“What happened here is a newspaper wanted to write about something, and it took them three years to get the documents,” he continued. “That’s success from the perspective of Worcester.”
After the lawsuit concluded, the city refused to provide any records related to the planning of its legal strategy, invoking attorney-client privilege to shield the documents from public scrutiny.
Quinn left the city for a job with Hassett & Donnelly in March 2022, but the city signed a contract with the law firm so that she could work on the T&G appeal and other cases. The city agreed to pay $250 an hour plus expenses.
The city had paid Hassett & Donnelly $18,000 for Quinn’s work on the T&G appeal as of February 7, according to documents provided by the city.
It’s not clear how much the city paid Quinn to fight the T&G while she was employed there. The city said in response to a records request that it didn’t track this information. In 2021, Quinn’s total pay was about $130,000.
Quinn did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to the legal fees, the city was required to pay $5,000 in punitive damages to the state’s Public Records Assistance Fund.
The fund was created by the 2016 update to the state’s public records law “to provide grants to municipalities to support the information technology capabilities of municipalities to foster best practices for increasing access to public records and facilitating compliance with [the public records law],” according to the text of the statute.
However, the state has never given out any grants.
“The only transaction appearing in our record of this fund since its inception is an amount of $5,000 credited to the fund on March 29, 2023,” said Michael Sangalang, the chief communications officer for the state comptroller’s office.
The state Legislature can appropriate money for the fund but has never done so.
In the settlement agreement, the city said that it had been “unable” to provide the punitive damages to the fund and was turning over the money to Prince Lobel Tye, the law firm that represented the T&G.
“The punitive damages payment has now been made to the appropriate account,” said Pyle, the T&G lawyer. “It took a while to locate the right people within the state government to coordinate the receipt of the payment.”
After nearly five years, the saga of the T&G’s most-recent public records lawsuit has come to an end. Meanwhile, the Justice Department investigation of the police department continues.
If you’d like to read more reporting like this, please consider supporting my work financially, either by signing up for a paid subscription to this newsletter or sending me a tip via PayPal.
If you have any story ideas, let me know about them! You can email me at aquemere0@gmail.com or send me a direct message on Twitter or Mastodon.
That’s all for now.
