Since 2020, I have spent about 40 hours in the Courtroom. I can’t say that Justice has been served. The Court has shown a disturbing level of patience and acceptance for City Attorneys and employees who are willfully misrepresenting information, lacking candor, and, in some instances, boldly lying.
Right-to-Know cases are being handled like criminal trial matters. The Court has shifted the burden on the record requester to prove the City should have provided the information rather than holding the City accountable to prove the case for nondisclosure. Citizens do not make good Trial Attorneys.
I have been amazed at how freely City Attorney’s violate their Professional Conduct Rules for candor and deliberately mislead the Court. Apparently, this is Standard Operating Procedure for today’s Courtroom. In these “criminal” Right-to-Know matters, the city is all about creating doubt by fabricating stories about how our records are stored.
In one instance, Attorney Bolton told Judge Temple that the City of Nashua prints out emails, stores them in paper form in 29,000 different files and then deletes the emails. There was no written policy or unwritten practice to do so. It was just a cockamamie statement made to sway the Judge to rule against an email records request. But more importantly, it made no sense and was unreasonable. The Judge was silent on this statement.
During a Trial, witness Kim Kleiner, under questioning, told the Court that she was aware that the written policy on record storage was incorrect, and that the policy had changed but was not updated. When Citizens requested, under the Right-to-Know Law, records for retention, Ms. Kleiner willfully provided the incorrect written policy, failing to provide an explanation that the policy had been changed but was not updated in writing. The Judge was silent on this testimony.
In another instance, Attorney Leonard wrote a recent Supreme Court Appellant Brief where she referenced, 13 times, that the City complied with the State required Record Retention laws and that the employee star witness, a supervisor clerk, had provided uncontroverted testimony and was an uncontroverted expert, always complying with the law. However, the Trial Transcript documented that the Supervisor was not aware of the City’s email retention policy and had never heard of the State Statute for Record Retention. Does this pass the red-face test? It does if you are Attorney Leonard, whose deceit is second nature.
To continue with her pattern and practice of deceit and misrepresentation, Attorney Leonard told the Supreme Court during March Oral Arguments that citizens must request their records through the right agency within the City. Since the City won’t tell citizens where or how the records are stored, the right agency is a mystery.
Deception, illusion, and dishonesty is Nashua’s game. The Court’s tolerance for these tactics has denied our right to keep our government open, accessible, and accountable.
A Lack of Transparency is a Symptom of Dishonesty
