DOC Pays $107,500 To Settle Prison Inmate Cases

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                      April 18, 2008

OLYMPIA – The Department of Corrections (DOC) today agreed to pay an inmate $107,500 to settle five legal cases, including two public disclosure cases in which the agency had withheld personal information about other offenders in order to maintain prison safety and security.

The settlement resolves five cases brought by Derek Gronquist, a former inmate of the Airway Heights Corrections near Spokane. He currently is incarcerated at Stafford Creek Corrections Center. The cases are:

  • A 2001 public disclosure case in which he requested a large number of prison records, including grievances filed by other offenders and infraction reports. The court ordered DOC to provide the information and to pay penalties, in large part for destroying inmate grievance documents when it believed it properly was following the state’s document retention law.  DOC agreed to pay Gronquist $79,000 to settle this case and $1,000 to settle another unrelated case.
  • A second public records disclosure case involving inmate grievances was filed in Spokane County in 2006 alleging DOC failed to place a hold on the destruction of archived records.  Offender infraction documents and correspondence documents also were involved in this request.  DOC agreed to pay Gronquist $22,500 to settle this case.
  • DOC also agreed to pay Gronquist $5,000 to discontinue litigation and not appeal a judgment in favor of DOC in a lawsuit about religious practices.

Referring to the 2001 public disclosure case that is being settled for $79,000, DOC Secretary Eldon Vail explained that the initial withholding of the grievance documents was out of concern for the safety of the inmates who had used the system.  Unfortunately the relevant documents were destroyed while litigation was pending.

Vail said, “Clearly how we respond to public disclosure requests needed some attention and we’ve made a lot of changes since then to be better stewards of the taxpayers’ money in these kinds of cases.”

Vail said DOC is centralizing its process for handling public disclosures requests to ensure responses are timely and accurate. Rather than going to individual prisons, the requests will go to a headquarters staff better trained to respond to them.  

DOC endeavors to comply with the public records law.  DOC handles large volumes of public disclosure requests each year. In 2007 DOC spent 17,000 staff hours processing more than 6,700 requests, approximately 73 percent of which came from offenders.

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