Tag: freedom of information act
How Prison Authorities Hide The 'Unnatural' Causes Of Prisoner Deaths

How Prison Authorities Hide The 'Unnatural' Causes Of Prisoner Deaths

On August 12, 2017, Sirrena Buie of Birmingham, Alabama talked to her son Kedric. He was incarcerated in a federal prison, United States Penitentiary Atlanta, and called his mother from inside.

The next morning another call came; a prison administrator dialed Sirrena and told her that Kedric had died.

“I'm like, What happened? I just talked to my son. What happened to my child? What happened to my son?” she said she asked the woman who called her that Sunday morning.

To this day it’s not clear what happened to Kedric Buie. The official story, according to his death certificate and autopsy report, is that “hypertension and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease” snatched 26 year old Kendric Buie’s life.

But those explanations didn’t make sense to his mother. When Sirrena viewed Kedric’s body, she noted a gash on his head as well as swelling so severe that he looked looked like he had gained 100 pounds. Moreover, a note sent to the autopsy provider suggested that Kedric might have overdosed on black tar heroin but the official toxicology report stated that he didn’t have any drugs or alcohol in his system.

Led by his mother, the search for what happened to Kedric Buie has been ongoing since his death. But lawyers bounced her around. Reporters and investigative journalists never prioritized her son's story.

To compound the mystery, a well-known journalist provided Sirenna what purports to be an amended autopsy report that says blunt force trauma killed her son.

That document from the journalist is particularly troublesome because Sirrena Buie was told by people familiar with the situation that her son Kedric was beaten by guards after he balked at a guard allegedly spitting in his food.

So Kedric’s death was either a homicide or a sudden deadly illness. Not knowing which one is unacceptable.

I commenced an investigation into what happened to Kedrick Buie and the results so far are concerning. On May 19, 2021 I filed a simple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a copy of Kedric Buie’s file within the Bureau of Prisons.

Over a year later, the Bureau of Prisons is either unable or unwilling to furnish a copy of Kedric Buie’s file. The Bureau acknowledged the request on July 6, 2021 and noted that the pandemic had caused processing times to get longer; it might take as long as nine months to provide the records requested, an estimate they later increased to 12 months because of pandemic-induced understaffing. The FOIA unit claims to have sent several requests for the file to the archive holding his file.

I followed up several times and the Bureau of Prisons’ responses bordered on nonsensical. On February 16, 2022, a paralegal explained that Buie’s file is beyond my reach because it hadn’t been received by the office that sent it out. “A search is still being conducted for records responsive to your request. In [particular], the file has not been received by institution who sent into to Archives” the email read.

Vincent Shaw, regional counsel for the Southeast regional office of the Bureau of Prisons, promised to update me on May 10, 2022. He didn’t and he hasn’t responded since, including not returning a request for comment on the matter.

Either Kedric Buie’s file is there in the Bureau of Prisons records or it’s not. And if it’s not, there’s cause for concern because it looks like a potential cover-up.

Covid-19 woke up the public to the reality that people die in prison without an assist from a death warrant. We don’t know exactly how many inmate lives COVID claimed — the Marshall Project and the Associated Press estimate it was about 2715 last June – but the problems with notifying families of prisoners’ health statuses came into full view during the pandemic. Many had no idea that their incarcerated loved ones had contracted the disease, ended up hospitalized or even succumbed to it.

On May 20,

Senators John Ossoff (D-GA) and John Kennedy (R-LA) introduced the Family Notification of Death, Injury, or Illness in Custody Act of 2022. Representative Karen Bass (D-CA) introduced an identical bill late last year. If the bill becomes law, it would require federal prison administrators to contact a person’s next of kin within twelve hours (during the day), provide the circumstances of their loved one’s passing and whether an investigation has been opened into the death. The bill’s sponsors hope that it would provide a model for state corrections systems.

COVID or not, the bill will get good use if it passes. In 2018, the last year for which data exists, state prisons reported 4,135 deaths (excluding 25 people executed in those facilities). That’s more than 10 per day and it’s the highest number since the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) started tabulating mortality data in 2001.

Dividing deaths between natural (illness) and unnatural (suicide, homicide, accident or overdose) the BJS said 77 percent of all prison deaths in 2018 were natural but it might not remain in that proportion for long; the number of unnatural deaths is growing. They were 11 percent of deaths in federal prisons in 2015 and 14 percent in 2018.

Notifying family of inmates’ health status should be dignified and empathetic, so it should be standardized. But this notification bill does more to make people who aren’t incarcerated feel better than it does to protect inmates and make these systems truly transparent. The Buie case demonstrates exactly why formal notification requirements can end up being an end run around real transparency.

An administrator called Sirrena Buie well within 12 hours of her son’s death and therefore preemptively satisfied what lawmakers think is a reasonable expectation for timely communication. And that administrator wasn’t required to tell the grieving mother about any investigation because none had been opened — even though the facts apparent now certainly warrant an inquiry.

Requiring administrators to connect with inmates’ family and friends won’t stop corrections officers from stomping prisoners and raising that number of unnatural inmate deaths even higher — nor from preventing the discovery of what caused these deaths.

Unfortunately, homicide at the hands of correctional staff is a pretty common occurrence. Just last month, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement charged four guards with the murder of an inmate whom they allegedly beat to death. Another was charged in 2021. Those cases were unusual in that investigators identified perpetrators and held them accountable. Authorities held no one responsible for the murder of an inmate who was essentially boiled to death in a shower in 2012.

Kedric Buie’s death may be one of those cases where staff get away with murder even though they notified his family quickly and dishonestly. Without even a general file on his incarceration, it’s still up for grabs who’s going to answer the question of what really happened to him — if that question ever gets a reply at all.

No Information? No Freedom.

No Information? No Freedom.

President Obama ran for office seven years ago promising the most open and transparent administration in history. But a clever test has revealed the chasm between that promise and reality.

Just seven of 21 federal agencies responded properly to a simple Freedom of Information Act request, while 10 of the remaining 14 agencies flouted the law. The Central Intelligence Agency responded by denying the request, but it turns out the CIA was playing games, as we shall see.

This lawlessness matters because government officials, regardless of party, like to hide information. They do this for myriad reasons, whether it’s to genuflect to defense contractors with lucrative contracts, conceal whether airport body scanners are effective, or to cover up misleading official statements.

Our government derives its powers from the consent of the people. It must be held accountable if our liberties are to endure.

That’s where a clever project by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University comes in.

To comply with the Freedom of Information Act, federal agencies must create a unique number to track each request, noting when the request arrived and when the case was closed.

TRAC asked 21 agencies for this and similar tracking data covering every FOIA request filed from October 2012 to December 2014.

Why such arcane data, which does not identify the requester or the information sought? Management professor Sue Long, a TRAC co-director, said that data is needed to analyze how quickly agencies comply with the Act.

The agencies must maintain such data in order to compile mandatory annual reports that disclose the volume of FOIA requests and the backlog of unfilled requests. That backlog rose significantly last year, in part because congressional Republicans slashed budgets for data gathering, statistical analysis, and fulfilling FOIA requests. This all makes government smaller, but also makes it less useful and accountable.

While seven of the 21 agencies complied, nine ignored the FOIA request or stopped responding to follow-up requests. Four agencies indicated they are trying to comply, but missed statutory deadlines. And one, the CIA, denied the request altogether, citing what are clearly specious grounds.

The CIA game playing is instructive.

The agency claimed it would need to create an entirely new kind of record in order to comply with the request, and on those grounds denied said request. But if the requested information was not available, it indicates that the CIA fails to comply with the recordkeeping requirements of the FOIA.

Kali J. Caldwell, a CIA spokesperson, told me that “while the CIA does maintain certain statistical data as required by law, the requester sought a specific record in which that data is compiled. The CIA does not have such a document and, therefore, could not comply with the initial request. Nevertheless, CIA did offer to provide documents that contained some of the same information in a different format. That offer was declined.”

Hello, Inspector General. May I suggest a timely subject for your gumshoes lies in the statement above, a classic of bureaucratic obfuscation — just because.

A History of Obstruction

Gregory J. Manno, a Syracuse assistant professor of journalism who devised the test, offered this nugget of Orwellian intrigue: One of the agencies that flouted the law was the Office of Information Policy at the Justice Department, the very outfit that is “responsible for encouraging agency compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.”

Dealing with government agencies that try to avoid disclosing their records is a hot topic at the two annual conferences held by Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a nonprofit that provides resources for investigative journalists, and has more than 5,400 members.

Mark Horvit, IRE executive director, says it’s the general consensus of journalists he has spoken to that the Obama administration has been less open than the George W. Bush administration. I warned about exactly this nine days after Obama took office, and took flak from those who said my piece was premature.

Obama gets bad press in good part because his administration tends to treat journalists with contempt, in contrast to the way the George W. Bush administration courted many reporters. Journalists, being human, tend to be more sympathetic to those who smile rather than growl, as Nancy Pelosi’s daughter showed in her documentary on the 2000 presidential campaign.

Dennis McDougal, formerly a Los Angeles Times reporter, sought records of a drug dealer who had extraordinary access to a Drug Enforcement Administration office. The Justice Department demanded McDougal pay research and photocopying fees, telling him the documents were only “to further your commercial interests.” This would seem to disregard the FOIA law, which authorizes fee waivers specifically for journalists and authors.

The official who turned McDougal down agreed to talk to me, but that conversation was ultimately blocked by Justice Department flacks. Justice has never responded officially to requests to explain its lawless behavior.

(Disclosures: I teach at the Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management, but have no involvement with TRAC. I am the immediate past president of IRE. McDougal and I were colleagues in the 1980s.)

Injury to the Public Interest

When President Lyndon Johnson approved the original Freedom of Information Act 49 years ago, his signing statement set the tone that has hobbled those seeking information ever since. The last 10 words of the following sentence told the bureaucracy to craft loopholes: “No one should be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest.”

The FOIA has been modified many times since. Two decades ago agencies asserted that digital records were confidential. President Clinton signed a 1996 law that specified the FOIA covers electronic records.

Obama has never come through on his promise of “transparency and open government.” He did, however, include a lawyerly disclaimer to his Open Government Directive:

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

Let’s expand our rights to know what our government does. Let’s start by telling our federal lawmakers to strengthen and expand the FOIA. We could do that in many ways. For instance, Congress could insist that, in cases of non-commercial requests, missed time deadlines result in automatic payments to requesters. Making the penalties grow by the day until the request is fulfilled would be another powerful motivational tool. Specious denials could subject FOIA officers to individual liability, which they could escape only by showing they were doing as instructed by superiors, who would then themselves become liable. Other options abound.

This is the Digital Age. We should make our government embrace it and its power of transparency.

Photo: Marino González via Flickr

Correction: Obama Is Not A Liberal

Correction: Obama Is Not A Liberal

WASHINGTON — Let me count the ways that President Barack Obama is not a liberal.

Obama ran as a liberal Democrat in the 2008 presidential primary, edging out centrist Hillary Clinton from the left. The liberal campaign pose became a convenient fiction he deployed while running to succeed a “war president.” Friends and foes are still caught up in that political fiction.

So let’s be clear: Obama has not governed as a liberal, not for a single day, not even when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. In Oslo, he gave a speech defending military action, hinting that he did not deserve or even want the honor. It was as if he didn’t want the world to see him anymore as a peace-loving liberal once he became commander-in-chief. He has eschewed liberalism in many ways since.

For starters, the national surveillance state — a beast created on his watch — springs to mind. It represents a huge loss of privacy and civil liberties for Americans, but Obama has not paid a price for it. Edward Snowden lives in exile for exposing the extent of government snooping at home. Abroad, leaders are furious that the National Security Agency spied on them, too.

For true liberals, such as Roane Carey, managing editor of The Nation, the revelations were a blow to their core beliefs. “That was one [terrible surprise] I didn’t see coming,” Carey said.

Second, the presidential embrace of Predator drones — in absolute secrecy — became Obama’s “signature” weapon in the global war on terrorism, which he extended. A single drone attack is an act of war out of the blue that may result in taking out a terrorist or two. But it’s not so clean and clinical. The damage we also inflict on civilians — say, causing the deaths of innocent village elders — is an uncounted cost of war. The spiral of anti-American anger could catch up with us, if it hasn’t already.

Then there’s the island jail of Guantánamo Bay, an albatross and human rights stain with dozens of detainees. Obama vowed to close it as a candidate. Now comes the president’s penultimate year in office, and he hasn’t spent the political capital needed to close Guantánamo, perhaps judging it a hopeless fight. But early on, the president had Democratic majorities in Congress.

On behalf of my tribe, the press, I note that the Obama administration’s record of refusing Freedom of Information Act requests is surprisingly high. Press organizations such as The Poynter Institute say interviews and access to public agency documents and employees are too hard to get. This crystallizes the complaining from reporters who say the secrecy they run into is undemocratic — small d. There was an unwritten way in which democracy should work day to day, with a presumption of transparency. Contrary to its claims, the Obama administration’s rigid stance toward the press violates the old ways and days. David Sanger of The New York Times is a critic of the “control-freak” administration’s high walls.

Obama issues next to no pardons compared with other presidents, so when he pardoned 22 nonviolent drug offenders, it made news. But thousands are incarcerated with harsh sentences for nonviolent crimes. Why so little mercy? On the other side of paradise, precious few moneyed Wall Streeters who helped drive the financial crisis ever went behind bars.

Sadly, the post-9/11 “homeland security” behemoth assembled by George W. Bush settled into stone when Obama took office. Author James Risen, an investigative reporter for TheNew York Times, writes, “Obama performed a neat political trick: He took the national security state that had grown to such enormous size under Bush and made it his own.” Facing arrest recently, Risen was pressed by authorities to reveal his source on an intelligence story but refused.

Finally, deep regret fills the space of something Obama didn’t do, which is to convene a great national conversation about race 150 years after Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War. Said a Washington editor with a keen sense of history: “Obama had the chance, and he declined to take it, opting instead to follow the path of war and violence against an enemy largely of America’s creation.”

Obama came riding in on a liberal white horse. But there’s no liberal in the White House.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

AFP Photo/Jim Watson