Eric Hood urges court to require AGO to justify widespread redactions in PRA dispute

Eric Hood, the movant in a Public Records Act dispute, told the court during oral argument that the Office of the Attorney General (AGO) had covered large swaths of its production with unjustified redactions and had not met its burden under the Public Records Act.

Hood said the AGO had "redacted 60 pages without any explanation" and had "redacted another 600 pages completely under the attorney-client privilege exemption," arguing that those redactions were not "credible or plausible" and that the agency's approach amounted to "deny, litigate, shift the burden of proof to me, and...withhold information from me and from the courts." He urged the court to require the AGO to re-review and produce records it concedes were improperly withheld.

The presiding judge pressed Hood on whether he had identified challenged pages in the Superior Court and whether such identification made the discretionary-review question unnecessary. Hood said he had identified some pages but insisted he could not reasonably identify every improperly redacted document because he lacks access to unredacted originals and that, in his view, only the AGO truly knows the full scope of withheld material.

Jennifer Steele, counsel for the Attorney General's Office, told the court the motion asks this court to review a Superior Court scheduling order and disputed Hood's framing. Steele said the AGO used redaction codes and provided brief explanations as required by the Public Records Act and that the scheduling order did not "shift the burden" to Hood. "The order asked Mr. Hood to identify the challenge, the redactions that he was challenging," Steele said, adding that there are "over 30,000 pages of records" in the production and that in-camera review of that volume would be discretionary and uncommon.

Steele acknowledged agencies must justify redactions and said requesters may challenge the adequacy of brief explanations in litigation; she argued Hood had not specifically pleaded brief-explanation defects in the scheduling order below and that ordinary case management practices limit the court's ability to review tens of thousands of pages in camera without a narrowed scope.

In rebuttal, Hood reiterated that the PRA places the burden on the agency to justify any withholding and that the AGO's acknowledged corrections in some records raised questions about the rest of the production. "By acknowledging there were some of those redactions were improper, it throws into question all of them," he told the court.

The presiding judge said the oral argument assisted his interpretation of the Public Records Act, took the motion under advisement and said he would issue a written ruling. Counsel noted that proceedings in the Superior Court continue on an early-March schedule while this discretionary-review motion is pending.

The court did not issue a decision from the bench; the matter remains under advisement pending the court's written ruling.