By Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Oct 12 (Reuters) – Alaska state employees
can use private email accounts for public business but the
messages must be preserved under public-records laws, the Alaska
Supreme Court ruled on Friday in a case stemming from
ex-Governor Sarah Palin’s communications practices.
Palin is out of office but the ruling could affect her
successor, Governor Sean Parnell, who is involved in his own
controversy over public records. Critics have accused Parnell
and his aides of using text messages rather than official emails
to keep communications out of public view.
Electronic messages about state business are no different
from paper communications under the Alaska Public Records Act,
the Alaska Supreme Court said in its unanimous 16-page written
decision that largely upheld a lower court ruling.
All paper or electronic messages regarding state business
must be preserved and made available for public review, in
accordance with state law, “and that duty cannot be extinguished
by a public official’s unreviewable decision simply not to
preserve them,” the court said.
A spokeswoman for Parnell said that his administration
viewed the court’s ruling as “favorable.”
“Text messages are, by their nature, transitory, so they
wouldn’t be appropriate for preservation or constitute public
records,” Parnell’s press secretary, Sharon Leighow, told
Reuters in an emailed statement.
Friday’s decision resulted from a lawsuit filed in 2008 by
Andree McLeod, an Anchorage activist who criticized Palin, the
Republican nominee for vice president that year, for using
private Yahoo accounts to communicate state business.
She and others contended that Palin used private accounts to
evade state public-records rules. McLeod also argued that no
state business should be conducted on private email accounts.
Open-records requests filed by McLeod and several
journalists resulted in release of thousands of pages of Palin
emails during her term as governor, many of them from her
private accounts. The emails were released in 2011 and earlier
this year, long after Palin resigned her post in 2009.
Friday’s ruling, though it partially affirmed the
lower-court ruling protecting the use of private emails, is a
victory for McLeod, her attorney said.
“The Alaska Supreme Court’s decision this morning
demonstrates the importance of what citizen activists such as
Andree McLeod can accomplish to advance the interests of all
Alaskans in ensuring that all state employees, from the governor
on down, conduct official state business in a manner that at all
times and through all means of communication serves the public
interest,” attorney Don Mitchell said in a statement.
An Aug. 27 opinion by the state legislature’s legal adviser
concluded that text messages are subject to state public records
laws. Parnell’s spokeswoman said at the time that the governor
disagrees and considers text messages to be “transitory in
nature” and difficult to preserve.
A representative for Palin could not immediately be reached
for comment.
