Discussion: Paper: Judge Must Reject Contempt Effort Over Parkland Story

I’m not sure I agree with the newspaper’s position.

If the information was unredacted then sure the school board fucked up.

But the fact that they were told by a third party how to remove the redactions says to me they made a conscious decision to violate privileged information that anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Things like HIPAA and the like knows is not ok to publish without consent.

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If the school was negligent in regards to the student then that needs to be addressed and the newspaper may take some credit for exposing that if they like. Their argument in defense of a contempt citation – that the document was inadequately protected – is simply bunk:. Accessing and publishing redacted material you were legally barred from accessing and then arguing you shouldn’t be charged for a crime is functionally no different than robbing a house and arguing the act was not criminal because the window was open.

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The newspaper probably knew they were fudging the rules but chose to reveal the redactions because the school board was protecting itself from liability in regard to the shootings.

My understanding from the article is the redactions were court ordered, not the school boards discretion…

Is the school board culpable for publishing a report in which the redactions could be removed? definitely.

However, the newspaper knowingly removed the redactions, and is using a really… novel?.. legal excuse that, like was previously mentioned, is akin to “I didn’t commit burglary because the door was unlocked”.

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This is a SLAPP suit by the School Board, unlawful in most states. the school board was ordered to redact the report, not anyone else, that they did a poor job of it is their responsibility. the newspaper has no legal obligation to honor that court order, as it wasn’t directed at them. if the judge in this case follows the actual law, it should be summarily dismissed, with an admonishment to the school board’s attorney for filing it in the first place.

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Finger pointing -----> Them, not us. Guess what, Them is part of us.

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Pretty sure that ‘robbing’ is better characterized as pointing out a critical failure in the system, which lead to tragic deaths. You know. The job of the press.

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I am absolutely not going to get into the pros and cons of the newspaper’s actions. But Bajayzus people, it’s 2018. Are you still pasting black rectangles into your PDFs and thinking that’s “redacted”?

I mean, what would you think if someone sent in a printed copy of the doc, with masking tape over the “redacted” bits, and expected that to be good enough?

Comes a time when this really should be fracking obvious to everyone with the electronic savvy of a first grader. (Says the parent of a rising first grader, who probably could do a better job of this than the school board.)

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Well, that’s the big question right there, and this article doesn’t even try to answer it: at whom was the court order directed? Courts don’t just order that things be done or not done; they order specific people and institutions to do or not do things. If they ordered the school board to redact something and the school board either didn’t do that or did it in a way that was so easy to defeat that it wasn’t really redaction at all, then it’s the school board that’s in contempt, not the newspaper. If the court ordered the NEWSPAPER not to publish the information, then the newspaper was in contempt, but I doubt if that’s what happened, because that’s what’s called “prior restraint” and courts can’t do it. But if the order was directed exclusively at the school board, how can some other entity possible be in contempt for disobeying it?

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So my statement in the post that “If the school was negligent in regards to the student then that needs to
be addressed and the newspaper may take some credit for exposing that” didn’t cover that enough for you?

Just yikes.

This is a no win, so sad, situation.

If you were this kid’s mom/step dad/aunt/sister who had been begging for help, how would you feel now that he had committed mass murder. HOW WOULD YOU FEEL??

Think about it. Rage? Horror? Guilt? Mind numbing frustration?

Just yikes…

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I’d have to look at Florida law, but in every state I’ve dealt with constructive civil contempt, unless the paper was specifically ordered NOT to print the names then there is no way the paper can be held in contempt.
Indeed, even if they were ordered not to, this would have to be a criminal contempt proceeding (with all the protections of a criminal case). Civil contempt is designed to compel compliance with an order, not to punish for bad behavior. Since the redacted info was already published and can’t be unpublished, there is nothing left to do but punish the paper. Thus, a criminal contempt proceeding is neccessary.

Would seem that the court would have to order the school board. And In a past life caught several Word docs that were not properly finalized when track changes had been on. They were for internal distribution as “final” copies. Lots of folks are clueless on how track changes really works.

The biggest fail, howevrr, was that the document was posted TO THE PUBLIC in Word format. Don’t know about lawyers, but competent media people publish PDFs so the final version is indeed final. Bottom line - never a word doc. Because it was, this would have gotten out anyway since the document’s issues were already discovered, paper was just informed there was an issue. It was inevitable the issue would have been discovered with a little work.

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I need sleep. I don’t understand how the newspaper became a party to the proceeding. How is this contempt?

They were the target of the proceeding because they violated a court order. The lede in the article summarizes it well enough but this paragraph lower down captures the essential detail I was responding to viz

The school board contended in its contempt filing that the Sun Sentinel
was well aware that two judges had ordered the redactions to protect
Cruz’s privacy but opted to publish the complete report anyway. In its
response, the newspaper argues it was the school board that may have
violated the judicial orders by posting the report with sloppy
redactions.

Not THIS this proceeding, the one where the court order issued. How were they party to that? If they were, and only if they were, they may be liable for violations of the order. The only culpable party I see now is the clown who didn’t erase the meta data before releasing the file. And that’s probably no more than negligence, which wouldn’t support a contempt finding AFAIK.

That may be a tort in invasion of privacy or defamation, but it ain’t contempt of court. No way, no how.

I assumed some connection under Florida law since the school board filed the complaint but have no idea what that would be. Wasn’t paying much attention to the legality of the issue in any case, only the logic of claiming that the absence of a barrier absolved a transgressor of culpability.

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