Despite the pandemic, the courts issued a surprisingly large number of significant OPRA opinions during 2020. Here is a quick review of these rulings.

There were two cases involving the critical question of public access to police internal affairs records. The Supreme Court ruled that these records are not accessible under OPRA. FOP v. City of Newark. However, in the summer of 2020 the Attorney General created an exception to this rule, adopting a policy that requires law enforcement agencies to disclose the identities of disciplined officers. See this post for a summary of the precedential Appellate Division opinion (now under review by the Supreme Court) upholding the policy’s validity.

The Supreme Court also granted review of two other 2020 Appellate Division that dealt with important OPRA issues: Bozzi v. Roselle Park and Simmons v. Mercado. In Bozzi, the court determined that OPRA’s privacy provision does not protect against the disclosure of home addresses that people have provided to the government. In Simmons, the court said, in a matter of first impression, that when an agency has access to another agency’s database, it is not the custodian of that system, and therefore cannot be required to answer OPRA requests for information contained in the database.

And there were three more precedential Appellate Division OPRA opinions:

–IMO Application for Med. Marijuana ATC for Pangaea, etc. –a public body may withhold disclosure of the names of the individuals who reviewed applications that were submitted to the public body in a competitive process.

–Libertarians for Transparent Govt. v. Cumberland County–a settlement agreement between a public body and its employee, which resolves an internal disciplinary action against that employee, is exempt from disclosure as a personnel record.

–Digital First Media v. Ewing Tp.–a Use of Force Report involving a juvenile must be disclosed under OPRA, with redactions to protect the juvenile’s identity.