West Virginia Supreme Court justices will hear arguments in an attempt by state jail officials to keep private a video depicting correctional officers throwing flash-bang grenades inside an inmate's cell.
On Friday, justices granted the state's request that oral arguments be held in its appeal of Kanawha County Circuit Judge Joanna Tabit's ruling making the video public. A date for the argument will be set later, according to an order list on the Supreme Court's website.
Tabit found that the video doesn't fall within exemptions to the state's Freedom of Information Act. She ordered last year that attorneys representing the West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority turn the video over within five days to Charleston attorney Paul Stroebel, who represents an inmate who alleges that he received severe burns in 2015 while incarcerated at the Western Regional Jail, in Barboursville.
Ben Freeman, an assistant attorney general, argues that the video footage is private because of an exemption to the FOIA that relates to the design of jails and detention facilities. Information that, if released, could be used by an inmate to escape from a facility or injure another inmate or staff member is exempt from being released.
Tabit wrote in her ruling last December that "nothing on the videotape would put any inmate, resident or facility personnel at peril nor could the same be used by any inmate to facilitate any type of an escape from the facility." Stroebel had asked Tabit to require the jail authority to respond to his FOIA request and turn over photos and videos from an incident involving his client, Shane R. Marcum.
During a hearing on Oct. 13, 2015, Stroebel told the judge that the Jail Authority didn't want to produce the video because, "It paints them in a terrible light - it's awful."