Thread: Access sought to felon records

http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/nat ... 53,00.html


Access sought to felon records

Report says illegal immigrant convicts aren't deported
By Rebecca Carr
Cox News Service
October 16, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A federal court of appeals hears oral arguments on Tuesday in a case that has broad implications in the debate over illegal immigration and the public's right to know about illegal immigrant convicts who have not been deported as required by law.
Cox Newspapers is asserting that the Justice Department should release the names, birth dates and identity numbers of illegal immigrants who have served prison time for serious crimes, including child molestation, manslaughter, drug dealing and drunken driving.

Cox hopes to use the data to show how many illegal immigrant convicts are slipping back into the community undetected rather than being deported to their native country as is required by federal law. Cox revealed in a published report four years ago that hundreds of felons in Georgia alone were never picked up by immigration officials after serving their sentences.

The Justice Department says that it has turned over some of the information requested by Cox under the Freedom of Information Act, which requires federal agencies to disclose government records to the public. The department gave Cox information about the illegal immigrants, including the convict's native country; date taken into custody; and date of release, according to legal briefs filed in federal court.

But personally identifiable information such as their full names, dates of birth, alien registration numbers and FBI numbers would invade the privacy of convicted illegal immigrants and serve no public interest, Justice Department lawyers wrote in legal briefs.

The case is important because it raises the question of whether illegal immigrants should be granted the same privacy protections that citizens and legal residents have in the Freedom of Information Act. Legal experts also say it illustrates how the federal government resists complying with disclosure requirements when it has embarrassing statistics to hide.

The lawsuit was filed by the Washington bureau of Cox Newspapers, one of the nation's largest publishing companies with 17 daily and 25 weekly newspapers. The author of this article is a Cox reporter based in Washington.

U.S. Dist. Judge Richard J. Leon issued a summary judgment ruling on Sept. 27, 2005, in favor of the Justice Department's decision to turn down Cox's request for personal information about the illegal immigrant convicts. In that decision, Leon wrote that the privacy interest of the convicted illegal immigrants "far outweighs the public interest that might be served from disclosing this information."

Cox is appealing that decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, saying that the public has the right to know if the government has been derelict in its duty to deport convicts who are here illegally. The public also has the right to know if the convicts have repeated their crimes, according to Cox lawyers Jonathan D. Hart and Michael Kovaka.

The Cox lawyers argue that the lower court failed to identify the harm that would come from disclosing the names of the convicted felons who evaded deportation.

"Established notions of privacy confirm that criminals generally have no legitimate privacy interest in limiting public knowledge of their crimes," Hart and Kovaka wrote in a legal brief filed with the court.

Hart and Kovaka argue that criminal convictions are already a matter of public record, so why should reporters be denied access?

Illegal immigrants do not have the same privacy rights as citizens and legal residents, Hart and Kovaka wrote. Indeed, the lawyers wrote, Congress specifically excluded undocumented aliens from the protections in the Privacy Act.

The case is important to the public because the information contained in the government database reveals that federal immigration officials are failing to properly execute the law, Kovaka said in an interview.

Cox's quest for information about illegal immigrants goes back four years. On Dec. 15, 2002, the Cox Washington bureau published an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution that revealed that 20 percent of the illegal immigrants who had been incarcerated in Georgia's prison system were set free instead of being deported as required by federal law.

At least eight of the criminals were convicted of molesting children. Others were caught dealing drugs. Still others were sent to prison for robbery.


Report hits releases

A Justice Department Inspector General report found that foreign-born inmates were passing through "virtually undetected" and then being released into the community, where more than a third in the study were soon arrested for new crimes.

Mike Cutler, a research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors lower levels of immigration, said it is "outrageous" to hold back the personal information of illegal immigrants who are convicted of a crime.

"The privacy law was never intended to protect aliens other than resident aliens and U.S. citizens," said Cutler, a former federal immigration agent. "It's a remarkable twist."

The federal government is refusing to release the database because it is embarrassed that it isn't doing its job, Cutler said.

-- Cox News Service

If you knew what the stats were you would be ill. I will attempt to get information on that. I may not be able to get national stats but I will look at state or county stats. I was recently reading about that elsewhere and they had stats.