WVU mess, 5/2/08

Try this one, courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Amid more demands yesterday for the resignation of West Virginia University President Michael Garrison, the search for documents in the case of Heather Bresch's defunct M.B.A. degree took an unusual twist.

The university can provide no records of phone calls Mr. Garrison made during the critical five-day period when WVU decided to award the governor's daughter a degree she did not earn.

The university does not have landline records for Mr. Garrison, assistant general counsel Shea Browning said. According to Mr. Browning, records of local landline calls are maintained for only 30 days and no long-distance calls were made using the identification number assigned to Mr. Garrison by the university.

The university's cell phone provider has been unable to produce a copy of Mr. Garrison's cellular records, Mr. Browning said.

When I read that yesterday, the first thing that came to my mind was Lenny Briscoe, the cranky detective on "Law & Order" played by the late great Jerry Orbach. Can you imaging Briscoe wanting a perp's phone records from less than nine months earlier and the phone company telling him it does not keep such records?

I hope the WVU folks are not using a ploy that folks in Ohio state government used until they were caught last year. They used personal cell phones and personal Yahoo e-mail accounts to conduct state business, figuring that would put their communications beyond the reach of Freedom of Information Act requests. But when people caught on to this, the attorney general told them they had better not do it anymore. Do they? I don't know.

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Following up on an item from yesterday,

BLUEFIELD, W.Va. (AP) — West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Elliott “Spike” Maynard “probably” will turn over e-mails requested by The Associated Press in a recent court case, the chief justice told the Daily Telegraph editorial board Thursday.

The AP filed a lawsuit in circuit court Wednesday to obtain e-mails, visitor logs and other records of Maynard. In the wake of the lawsuit, the chief justice, as well as four other candidates currently running for a seat on the high court, were asked by the Telegraph’s Editorial Board if these correspondence were under the public’s purview through the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

The overall consensus by the candidates: Yes, the e-mails do fall under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, except for those that would fall within the realm of normal statutory exceptions.

The Associated Press lawsuit claims the court was wrong when it decided that records maintained by Maynard were not subject to FOIA. The AP sought the records earlier this year as part of its coverage of a European rendezvous between Maynard and Massey Energy chief Don Blankenship in July of 2006. ...

Maybe there is hope for some people.