After a public records lawsuit by Knoxville TV station WBIR, the University of Tennessee has turned over unredacted copies of operating agreements and other documents for a partnership that runs Oak Ridge National Laboratory and paid $60,000 to cover WBIR's attorneys fees and litigation costs.
The records of a new Tennessee centralized immigration enforcement division will largely be secret from the public under an exemption added to a bill in its lightening-speed path to its approval.
The governor's voucher bill, called the Education Freedom Scholarship Act, would provide money, beginning next year at $7,075, for students in private schools to use toward their education. But the bill is not like the pilot voucher plan that the governor started a few years back in Davidson, Shelby and, later, Hamilton counties. And it has no requirements for measuring outcomes, such as how many vouchers go to children already in private schools.
The Tennessee Department of Correction tried to keep its new execution protocol for lethal injection secret. But after a week of wide news reporting of the state's refusal to release the document, it changed its mind and provided the document with redactions. The tussle shows how secrecy about lethal injection as a method of execution continues to be a problem.
The Tennessee Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case in which a lower court judge refused to unseal court records in a test of the First Amendment right of access by the public to court proceedings and court documents.
