Worcester named finalist for government secrecy award
City could win Golden Padlock Award after waging costly fight to conceal police misconduct records
The city of Worcester is one of four finalists for this year’s Golden Padlock, an annual award that Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. bestows on the most secretive government agencies and officials. IRE chose the city for wasting thousands of tax dollars on an illegal effort to keep records of police misconduct investigations secret for years.
In 2018, Telegram & Gazette reporter Brad Petrishen requested several internal-affairs reports and officer complaint histories from the city. The journalist 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.
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.
After a four-day trial, Worcester Superior Court Judge Janet Kenton-Walker ruled in June 2021 — just a few days shy of the three-year anniversary of Petrishen’s requests — that officials were wrong to withhold the records.
In January 2022, Kenton-Walker further ruled that officials acted in bad faith by advancing legal arguments they knew to be incorrect. She ordered the city to pay $5,000 in punitive damages to a state fund and to cover the T&G’s legal fees and expenses — however, she cut the paper’s requested fee award from $217,000 to $101,000.
Jeffrey Pyle, the T&G’s lead attorney, 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 higher amount.
The city agreed to a $180,000 settlement in February.
During the trial, Worcester was represented by Wendy Quinn, the city’s chief litigator at the time. Quinn’s primary argument was that the city did not need to release records about officers who were being sued.
“The city says you can have records of the good officers but not the allegedly bad officers who are frequently sued,” Pyle said in his closing argument. “That turns the accountability function of the public records law on its head.”
Kenton-Walker determined 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.”
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.
Appeals Court Justice John Englander slammed the city’s conduct during oral arguments about the legal fees.
“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.”
The city had paid Hassett & Donnelly $18,000 for Quinn’s work on the appeal as of February 7, shortly before the settlement was signed, 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.
A spokesperson for the city did not respond to a request for comment or make City Manager Eric Batista or City Solicitor Michael Traynor available for interviews.
IRE has awarded the Golden Padlock every year since 2013. The award is an actual trophy that IRE has tried to give to government officials.
“Each year, we invite the winner to attend the award ceremony to be honored and receive the award,” said Robert Cribb, a journalist who is director of the Toronto-based Investigative Journalism Bureau and chairs IRE’s Golden Padlock committee. “In the nine years we have been handing out the Golden Padlock, no winner has ever accepted our invitation. Or even responded.”
The Massachusetts State Police won in 2015. The following year, Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin and Shawn Williams, who was then serving under Galvin as the state’s supervisor of public records, were finalists but lost to the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
This year, the other finalists include the city of Vallejo, California, the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy, and the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
According to the news release from IRE, the group chose the finalists “from a competitive field of nominees.”
The release continues: “Each of them champions the highest principles of bureaucratic intransigence through techniques that include imposing interminable delays for accessing records, demanding exorbitant fees, launching court challenges blocking public access to records and destroying vital public information and evidence detailing the actions of government officials.”
“Reaching the highest levels of government secrecy requires fearlessness in doing whatever it takes to keep citizens in the dark,” Cribb said. “These elite-level players have distinguished themselves through extraordinary commitment to information suppression.”
IRE will announce the winner of the Golden Padlock during its June 24 conference in Orlando.
IRE notes that, in November, the US Department of Justice opened 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.
In recent years, the department has faced constant allegations of brutality and dishonesty.
On Wednesday, eleven people filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that, during a 2020 protest against the police murder of George Floyd, they “suffered gratuitous violence, false arrest and malicious prosecution on baseless criminal charges, theft or damage of cell phones, and in some cases racist slurs — all from [Worcester police] officers under a duty to keep the peace.”
Police in riot gear used chemical weapons to attack demonstrators and bystanders, arrested the plaintiffs without cause, and filed false police reports, according to the lawsuit.
After receiving complaints, the department “mounted a perfunctory whitewash of an investigation done by a biased member of its internal affairs office who had to be transferred out of the department’s internal investigations unit because of his own misconduct,” the lawsuit alleges.
The suit names the city, former City Manager Edward Augustus, Police Chief Steven Sargent, and more than a dozen police officers as defendants.
In September, the city agreed to a $275,000 settlement with Christopher Ayala-Melendez, who was attacked and arrested by a group of officers outside the Worcester Beer Garden in 2019.
Police were outside the restaurant responding to a fight when Ayala-Melendez returned from a walk with his girlfriend and approached an officer to ask whether he could enter his apartment, according to the lawsuit.
K9 officer Shawn Tivnan grabbed Ayala-Melendez and pulled him toward Tivnan’s attack dog, which bit Ayala-Melendez, then officers threw him to the ground and handcuffed him, video from a surveillance camera shows. Officers also threw Ayala-Melendez’s girlfriend to the ground, the video shows.
Tivnan filed a false police report accusing Ayala-Melendez of behaving aggressively and pushing him. Prosecutors dropped the charges after viewing the video.
Tivnan and Brett Kubiak, another officer named in Ayala-Melendez’s lawsuit, are also named in the class-action lawsuit over the 2020 protest.
In May, the city agreed to pay $248,500 to settle allegations that two officers, John Alers and Paul McCarthy, used excessive force when they handcuffed a 10-year-old autistic boy in 2017.
After the boy’s mother, called 911 for help, the officers arrived before the ambulance, pulled the boy out of his mother’s car, kneeled on his neck and legs, handcuffed him, and fractured his arm, which caused him to require surgery, according to the lawsuit.
The city denied wrongdoing, calling the case “an unfortunate incident in which the police responded to a mother’s request for help and were trying to protect and keep a young autistic boy safe that resulted in a broken arm.”
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Here’s what IRE said about why it selected the other three 2023 Golden Padlock finalists:
The City of Vallejo, California, for intentionally destroying key documents related to multiple police shootings in the city. The 2021 purge, which violated the city’s own policy and possibly an agreement with the California Department of Justice, happened with the approval of a senior city attorney. In all, hundreds of pieces of physical and audiovisual evidence were lost – including fingerprints, interviews with witnesses and officers, clothing from the victims, and detectives’ case files – despite pending public requests for those records. The detective who initiated the document destruction was involved in all of the cases, reporting by Open Vallejo found. The scandal has drawn the attention of both California and the United States Departments of Justice, and local residents are now demanding that federal officials take control of the Vallejo Police Department. Earlier this month, California’s attorney general said a civil rights investigation into Vallejo Police is “on the table.”
The Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy for its staunch commitment to blocking release of internal emails about a growing public health risk in the state. The agency originally quoted the Flatwater Free Press a fee of $2,000 to access internal emails referencing a cancer-causing chemical in fertilizer that has been increasingly showing up in Nebraska drinking water. When a reporter submitted a simplified request to reduce the fee, the agency instead increased the fee by 2,000 percent. The new total: $44,103.11. For that amount, agency employees – instead of attorneys – would review their own emails to determine whether they should be released to reporters. Flatwater Free Press sued. And won. But the records still haven’t been released. The department appealed the decision which is now headed for the state supreme court.
The City of Bridgeport, Connecticut, for chronic violations of the state’s open records laws that routinely delay disclosures for more than a year without repercussions. With a backlog of 3,000 unfulfilled Freedom of Information requests, Bridgeport violated public records law 28 times over the past decade – by far the most in the state – a Hearst Connecticut Media investigation found. While the state’s Freedom of Information commission has taken the unusual step of fining the city, the law caps penalties at $1,000. In response to the reporting, a state legislative committee is now pushing to dramatically increase the fines and enforcement for government agencies that violate public records laws. Lawmakers are also considering increasing funding for staff at the state watchdog agency that enforces the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act.
That’s all for now.