It took a while, but the Uintah Basin Standard finally figured out why the attorney general raided the local school district.

Click here to read the Standard's article. What it took to get the story highlights some deficiencies in Utah's system for disclosing search warrants:

The Standard's Geoff Liesik learned about the raid in late August, but nobody was willing to tell him what the attorney general was investigating. So Liesik went looking for the search warrant, which is suppose to say why authorities are investigating someone and what they seized.

But nobody would even tell Liesik in which court the warrant was filed. Liesik even sent a records request to the attorney general asking for the location of the warrant, but the office denied his request, saying the warrant had been sealed by a judge. The attorney general did not say which one.

But applications for secrecy orders are public records, too. But, again, Liesik did not know in which court to look for the application.

Meanwhile, this was all creating a lot of work for Liesik, who is the newspaper's only full-time news reporter.

Liesik told me he was thinking to himself: "I'm going to fight this fight and go around in circles with [the attorney general], and they're going to file charges or send out a press release saying they are not going to file charges and all this work is going to be moot."

Then a breakthrough: Nancy Volmer, the public information officer for Utah District Courts, found the secrecy application filed in 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City. The courts eventually release the application, thereby disclosing some details of the attorney general's investigation.

— NC

Labels: court records, GRAMA