When lawyers are duking it out, generally neither side can be taken totally at face value, since they are going to only present one side of an adversarial situation.
That said, it certainly seems that the University of Mississippi has stolen a page out of former Gov. Haley Barbour’s playbook when it comes to trying to fend off requests for public records.
Ole Miss has told the attorney for former Rebel football coach Houston Nutt that he will have to cough up more than $25,000 if he wants the university to hand over five years of cellphone logs from another, recently departed Rebel coach, Hugh Freeze.
Nutt’s attorney, Thomas Mars, says he needs those records to further shore up his client’s claim that Freeze defamed Nutt by falsely telling reporters and recruits that most of the NCAA’s allegations of cheating against the school occurred during Nutt’s tenure as head coach.
A small slice of those cellphone logs was instrumental in exposing the sex scandal that led a couple of weeks ago to Freeze’s sudden resignation.
But a school attorney told Mars that before the university gives Nutt or his counsel more of those records, it will need to have outside counsel review them to see what the school has to turn over and what it can or must redact. And, of course, outside counsel isn’t cheap, thus the $25,000 price tag.
This is reminiscent of the ploy Barbour used, while he was governor and weighing a possible run for president, and the national news media came digging.
When the magazine Mother Jones made a public records request for all of Barbour’s official emails, calendars, call logs and travel records as governor, his staff told the publication it would have to make a down payment of $60,000 — with a possible final cost of $200,000 — to get the documentation because of all of the time and people, including $175-an-hour attorneys, involved in the retrieval, review and permissible redacting of the records.
Subsequently, in an effort to combat such stonewalling, the state Ethics Commission, which enforces the Public Records Act, established a rule that said an agency can only charge what it costs for the lowest-paid employee to perform the required tasks to comply with the records request.
It’s unclear what the university thinks is redactable from the list of phone numbers Freeze called on his university-issued cellphone. Perhaps the phone numbers of recruits and players are exempt under federal privacy laws that protect student records.
Even if that’s the case, though, it wouldn’t take an attorney to match up the Freeze-dialed phone numbers with those of current or former students. There’s probably a computer program that could do it. If not, any modestly paid clerk could do the tedious comparison.
Mars has threatened to take the university to court if it keeps up with what he claims is a stalling tactic. It sounds as if he has a good case.
Tim Kalich, Greenwood Commonwealth
