Miami and London

Ohio Public Records Briefing – Issue #46

Welcome back to another edition of the Public Records Briefing. We’ve been getting so many questions about Marsy’s Law, so we start right off the bat with one of them below.

Fun Fact

The enactment of Marsy's Law (and then its subsequent changes this past July) has created some major changes that deal with victims' rights and redactions. We covered this in detail in our recent members-only webinar on this topic.

The July changes to the law created big differences in what gets redacted and victim rights depending on the crime that was committed. Generally, the law created a broad category of "serious crimes." This, of course, is not a serious crime.

Victims of these crimes get automatic redaction and other important differences. What are the crimes that make up these serious crimes?: (1) violation of a protective order, (2) any "offense of violence" (listed in R.C. 2901.01), and (3) any sexually oriented offense (listed in R.C. 2950.01). Altogether, there are 40-something crimes included as “serious crimes.”

PS – All crimes are serious obviously, but we have to come up with something to call this group of crimes! And we are not discussing fashion crimes but maybe in an upcoming edition!

Public Records 101

This week, we're finishing up our body cam exceptions series with what we call the "red light" provisions of the Public Records Act. Recall that we coined this term years ago in our public records training to help people visualize the three categories of public records: green light (go and always release); yellow light (you have the choice to release or not); and red light (it would violate the law to release the record).

This week, we’re talking about body or dash cam footage that cannot be publicly released EXCEPT when "consent" is given.

R.C. 149.43(A)(17)(c) through (f) appear to be "red light" exceptions that say body cam footage showing the serious injury or death of a person or first responder or nudity can't be released unless the person or their representative (in the event of death) consents to that release. Remember that that this consent exception doesn’t apply if a police use of force caused the injury or death!

States Not Named Ohio

Like Lebron in 2010, this week we’re taking our talents to South Beach.