Frat Hazing and Tennessee's Law
Ohio Public Records Briefing - Edition #108
March is here! Let’s march into another edition of the Public Records Briefing. Here’s hoping that the weather here in Ohio will head towards spring and warm! Maybe not.
States not named Ohio
Glad you work in Ohio? You’ll be even more glad when we tell you about a proposed Tennessee law about public records requests for body cameras. Unlike Ohio, Tennessee apparently lacks a standard public records policy surrounding body camera footage and its availability. A new proposed law would set standards for the state and all of its police.
What’s more interesting is that in Tennessee, you must be a resident of the state to make public records requests! Officials or administrators there can require proof of address, in order to release documents. According to the article, people from other states have recruited someone who is a Tennessee resident to request records on their behalf. At least one author of the proposed law wants to change that to allow out-of-state residents to request records.
Reading the article gives you a better appreciation for Ohio law and how it uniformly applies to our 900+ police departments around the state. While you might not like parts of it, hopefully we can all agree that having hundreds of police departments make up their own standards for redaction and public records requests would be more annoying than this.
Finally, just a courtesy reminder since we’re talking about it. If you haven’t adopted your records policy to allow your agency to charge for body camera records requests, you should do that ASAP!
Court Case(s) Review: State ex rel. Fenstermaker v. Grogan, 2026-Ohio-482.
We have another new case where an inmate wants public records (apparently they have lots of time on their hands). Or perhaps they’re just trying to make some quick money while other employment opportunities are diminishing.
In this case, inmate Tony Fenstermaker requested public records from the Marion County Prosecutor’s office. Fenstermaker sent a certified mail request in March 2024 for three items: (1) certified financial statements from 2016 to 2021, (2) the office’s records retention schedule, and (3) a cashbook tracking money received from 2016 to 2022. The public office responded about two weeks later, providing the retention schedule and introductory letters for the statements, but it omitted the attachments to those statements. This will be important later when we come back for statutory damages, stay tuned.