is in the process of obtaining CIA records regarding the 1978 deaths of Jim Jones and his followers at Jonestown, Guyana. - We are representing NBC reporter Carl Stern in a suit to obtain the names of three FBI officials who were censured for their role in the Bureau's misleading congressional committees, GAO investigators and a federal court regarding FBI illegal break-ins targeted against dissident groups. The district court ordered disclosure, and the case is on appeal. Representing the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, we obtained reports by the Department of Education relating to non-compliance of local school districts with antidiscrimination court orders. - - We represented an independent researcher who had published a report criticizing the leniency of recent enforcement efforts by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. After OSHA publicly denounced the report, the researcher used FOIA to obtain internal documents which analyzed the validity of his charges and, notwithstanding OSHA's public denials, substantially confirmed their accuracy. - partment Public Citizen used the FOIA to ask the Justice De to disclose information about cases where it decided not to seek appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate charges against high-level government officials. Without disclosing the names of the officials or the alleged offenses, Justice made public a list of the statutes allegedly violated in those cases, which helped to evaluate whether the Special Prosecutor procedures are triggered for major or minor crimes. NOTE: Expiration date will be imprinted at time of packaging. CONFIDENTIAL THIS MATERIAL 10 THE PROPERTY OF CUTTER The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and discovery provide separate mechanisms for obtaining the disclosure of Government documents. Any person may invoke at any time the release provisions of the FOIA by requesting an agency to disclose any reasonably described agency records. A requester's need for the records and his purpose in making the request normally do not affect the right to obtain disclosure. The agency must release the records unless they fall within one of the nine exemptions specified in the Act. On the other hand, a person may obtain the disclosure of Government documents through discovery only if he is a party to a judicial or administrative proceeding and if the procedural rules governing the proceeding include provisions for discovery. If both these conditions are satisfied, the party may normally obtain from the Government through discovery unprivileged documents relevant to the subject matter of the pending proceeding. The separate disclosure mechanisms established by the FOIA and by discovery serve different purposes. Congress' fundamental objective in enacting the FOIA was to permit the public to inform itself about the operations of the Government. All members of the public are beneficiaries of the Act because Congress' goal was a better informed citizenry. A requester's rights under the Act are therefore neither diminished nor enhanced by his status as a party to litigation or by his litigation-generated need for the requested records. Discovery, on the other hand, serves as a device for narrowing and clarifying the issues to be resolved in litigation and for ascertaining the facts, or information as to the existence or whereabouts of facts, relevant to those issues. In the discovery context, a party's litigation-generated need for documents does affect the access available to him and may result in the disclosure to him of documents not available to the public at large. Discovery does in fact provide parties to litigation with the more reliable mechanism for obtaining from the Government the information which they need to prepare for trial or hearing. Parties to litigation nevertheless sometimes use the FOIA for discovery purposes because they hope to obtain the release of additional agency records for use in litigation, or to obtain the release of records at an earlier time. Limitations on the availability of discovery explain these uses of the FOIA. Discovery is a pretrial procedure designed to permit the parties to a proceeding to prepare for trial or, if possible, to resolve the controversy without a trial. It is not designed to provide the parties with the level of access to Government documents furnished to the general public by the FOIA; and even the most generous rules of discovery do not always provide the parties with that level of access. |