(C) Virginia Mercury This story was originally published by Virginia Mercury and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Judge orders release of Richmond graduation shooting report with limited redactions [1] ['Sarah Vogelsong', 'More From Author', '- January'] Date: 2024-01-16 A judge ordered the Richmond School Board to release an external report it commissioned on a June 2023 shooting outside a high school graduation ceremony in downtown Richmond that left two dead and five others wounded. The ruling was a victory for local news outlets who had asked for copies of the report and a defeat for school officials who had been trying to keep it secret. The Tuesday order from Judge W. Reilly Marchant requires the school division to make the report public by 1 p.m. Wednesday but permits redactions to “several minimal parts of the report that do constitute legal advice.” The ruling says a confidential account of the allowed redactions will be filed with the court. The Richmond School Board had argued that because the third-party report was written by a law firm, Sands Anderson, it was subject to attorney-client privilege and could be kept confidential under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Marchant disagreed, writing that the report, “taken as a whole, was not created for the primary purpose of providing legal advice, and the express terms of the resolution, upon which the report is based, are very clear in that regard.” Attorney-client privilege, he continued, “does not protect documents and other communications simply because they result from an attorney-client relationship. … The privilege protects only those disclosures necessary to obtain informed legal advice which might not have been made absent the privilege.” Marchant’s ruling is in line with the argument put forward by the three petitioners who sought release of the report in Richmond Circuit Court: the Richmond Times-Dispatch, news station WTVR and transparency activist Josh Stanfield. In a hearing last week, attorneys for the news outlets repeatedly pointed to the resolution passed by the School Board on Aug. 14 to authorize a third-party investigation related to the shooting. That resolution called for the report to examine “graduation day operations from set up, to break down,” “the process and procedures for entrance of all students and guests,” “written statements” from school and division staff on “preparations for all graduations on June 6” and “the breakdown of our homebound process and procedures that directly impact grading.” Homebound services are provided to students who cannot attend school in person for various reasons. Richmond police have said they believe the June 6 shooting outside the Huguenot High School graduation ceremony was related to an ongoing feud that involved Shawn Jackson, a student killed in the shooting who had been enrolled in Richmond Public Schools’ homebound program. Division policy prohibited homebound students from participating in school-sponsored activities such as the graduation. “It is clear that this was primarily a fact-finding mission,” said David Lacy, an attorney for the Times-Dispatch, during Friday’s hearing. Marchant emphasized that the School Board had chosen not to include “legal or legality issues” in its Aug. 14 resolution and noted that Richmond Superintendent Jason Kamras had testified that he did not engage Sands Anderson to do more than what the resolution directed. Furthermore, he wrote, an outline of the work Sands Anderson agreed to perform “mirror[s] exactly the language of the 8/14/2023 resolution.” “Clearly nothing within the four corners of the 8/14/2023 resolution sought legal advice,” wrote Marchant. “The resolution is very straightforward in what the School Board wanted from the investigation, and legal advice was not included.” The question of whether the report should be released has split the Richmond School Board, which voted 6-2 against making it public this November. The board was allowed to review the report in a closed session on Nov. 6, but members were not permitted to keep any copies. Board member Jonathan Young told WTVR that he didn’t “have words to describe how damning a report this is. My jaw hit the floor. I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know how bad.” Other members voiced concern that releasing the report could open up the school division to litigation. In his ruling, Marchant concluded that “any potential consequences of publicly disclosing the report are not a basis to exempt the report from mandatory disclosure.” “A non-privileged document does not somehow become privileged simply because it includes information the owner would prefer not to disclose,” he wrote. In a statement, Kamras said he and School Board Chair Stephanie Rizzi “welcome the release of the report and we will have a full statement tomorrow.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2024/01/16/judge-orders-release-of-richmond-graduation-shooting-report-with-limited-redactions/ Published and (C) by Virginia Mercury Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/virginiamercury/