Missed getting this up yesterday, as EarthLink had our Internet service down for 24 hours, but the state Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that local governments in North Carolina can't sue their citizens because those citizens demand records or access to meetings. A no-brainer, you'd think.
Background: Tom Boney, publisher of The Alamance News, challenged a closed Burlington City Council meeting in 2002. Boney said the city had no business closing that particular meeting on that particular topic (whatever it was), and he threatened to sue the town. Hearing that, the town of Burlington preemptively sued Boney, bringing the notion of "slap suits" to a new historic low. Burlington to Boney: "You threaten to get information out of us, and we'll sue your ass." Plus a local trial judge allowed the suit against Boney to go forward, and then ruled that the closed meeting of the city council was legal.
Boney fought back, first with the Court of Appeals, which agreed with him. But the Town of Burlington appealed to the state Supremes, which Thursday said, "You're kiddin', right?" Thank God.
Boney is a former legislative aide to U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, but despite how much we might disagree with his politics, his right to hear and see what local government is up to should be sacrosanct. And now the state Supreme Court has made that obvious assumption official: a city or county government cannot preemptively sue its citizens to prevent them from finding out what's going on.
Boney spent about $45,000 to have his rights upheld. We certainly hope he's successful in recovering that money from the town of Burlington. Otherwise, there's a second major miscarriage of justice: that to uphold a citizen's right to information, that citizen must resort of an expensive legal process. Ain't right.
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