Lawsuit: Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office Has Violated GA Open Records Act for Nearly 2 Years

The Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office is being sued over claims it has failed to comply with the Georgia Open Records Act for nearly two years.

The lawsuit, filed in Gwinnett County Superior Court last week, was brought by The Georgia Gazette LLC,  a Georgia-based online newspaper that publishes crime-related news and booking photos, among other things. The entity publishes news in 90 counties across the state.

But in Gwinnett County, The Georgia Gazette alleges, obtaining public records has been considerably more difficult and has impacted the entity’s ability to conduct business – all at the hands of the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office. 

“The…issues make it challenging and sometimes impossible for The Georgia Gazette to use the records it receives from the GCSO in a timely manner in its business operations,” the suit reads.

The Georgia Gazette’s suit names the Sheriff’s Office and John Does 1-3 (unidentified employees of GCSO), who are collectively accused of failing to respond to Open Records Act (ORA) requests in a timely manner, unnecessarily redacting records, and charging more for records than what is legally allowed – sometimes billing for more than ten hours of work for mere arrest records and daily jail data. In nine months, the office has invoiced more than $37,000 in fees for readily available public records.

Suit details a timeline of issues dating back to 2023

From August 2020 until July 2023, The Georgia Gazette obtained jail records directly from a portal made available to the media and other individuals by the Sheriff’s Office. The records were provided at no cost during this time. In July 2023, however, The Georgia Gazette says the process changed and while other entities were still permitted to utilize the portal, The Georgia Gazette’s access was terminated. As a result, The Georgia Gazette began filing records under the Open Records Act to obtain documents.

Under Georgia law, government entities have three business days to fulfill an ORA request. If records cannot be provided within that time period, entities are required to provide a cost estimate and an expected date of production for the records. The law also requires that records be provided to the requestor as they become available and by the “most economical means” possible.

Unnecessary Burdens to Obtain Records with Duplicative Processes 

The suit alleges that GCSO began denying requests for records because individual arrestee names were not listed in the request, something GCSO said the law required. No such requirement exists anywhere in the ORA, however, and it is common for media outlets to request ‘weekend arrests’ or information pertaining to ‘all arrested individuals’ from a certain date or time period.

After attorney intervention, GCSO began sending The Georgia Gazette a list of names of people booked into the Gwinnett County Jail each day and The Georgia Gazette would respond by using the names to request the records based on the list sent by GCSO. This went on for roughly four months before GCSO stopped requiring specific names before fulfilling a request.

Lengthy Response Times, Inconsistent & Costly Bills 

In November 2023, The Georgia Gazette says it began requesting weekly records instead of daily records in hopes of reducing administrative burdens, lowering costs, and decreasing response time. But this did not occur.

The suit alleges:

• More than 30 violations of the three-day initial response time for requests by GCSO. 
• Repeated ‘boilerplate’ estimates of ‘10 business days’ from the date of payment
  • The issue, in part, is that the ORA does not permit local governments to require pre-payment for requests under $500. The ORA also requires that specific production dates be provided for each request.
• GCSO invoiced for 90 hours of work (11.25 business days) but produced the records within one hour on two different days. 
• On a per-photo basis, larger requests do not always equate to more expensive invoices. In one instance, 122 photos cost $1.75 per photo while requests for 47 photos cost $2.61 per photo.
• GCSO has no consistent billing practices, including billing at hourly rates higher than that of the records custodian and at employee rates of individuals who have no record of participating in the records production process. 
• In 2023, GCSO charged The Georgia Gazette an average of $70 per request. GCSO asserted 5 hours and 26 minutes of labor per request at $23.83 per hour for IT and $16 per hour for miscellaneous labor. By the end of 2024, those fees had increased to $145.88 per request, equating to roughly 7 hours and 10 minutes per request with IT rates of $38.21 per hour and $19.14 per hour for miscellaneous labor. 
  • These fees are for the same records the Sheriff’s Office provided via the portal at no cost prior to July 2023 and case law has long supported that records which can be retrieved in a minimal computer search cannot be produced at exorbitant fees.

And finally, The Georgia Gazette contends that the jail records have, on at least one occasion, been provided via a ‘batch file’ which indicates that the records do not take eleven hours to produce each day, as cited by GCSO. This is reiterated by the fact that for a period of four months in 2023, GCSO sent a daily list of arrested individuals to The Georgia Gazette so that it could, in return, send requests for records.

Between June 17, 2024 and the filing date of the lawsuit, The Georgia Gazette had paid more than $37,946 to the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office for 257 requests for jail records.

Suit Seeks Compliance with ORA, Other Remedies

The Georgia Gazette says it sought remedy through the Georgia Attorney General’s Office in June 2024, which mediated some of the issues, but the responsiveness of the agency and the inflated costs remained problematic. A second complaint through the Attorney General’s Office in October 2024 left the mediation at a standstill as GCSO continued its same practices.

Under the Georgia Open Records Act, the state Attorney General’s Office has jurisdiction over civil and criminal enforcement, though AG Chris Carr has been largely ineffective at ensuring compliance by state and local entities. In recent years, his office has demonstrated a pattern of unresponsiveness to complaints from citizens, businesses, and government officials alike unless it is politically expedient to do so. The inaction on the part of his office leaves complainants with only one option for civil remedy: the superior courts. 

The suit by The Georgia Gazette LLC asks a superior court judge to order the Sheriff’s Office to comply with the Act and to 1) reimburse The Georgia Gazette for excessive charges levied by GCSO, 2) to institute civil penalties against GCSO employees who negligently violated the ORA, 3) to award attorneys fees, and any other relief the court sees fit. The suit seeks a jury trial, if necessary.

TheGeorgiaVirtue.com will continue to bring you coverage of this story as it unfolds.