(California Supreme) Court eyes releasing names of cops in shootings
The state Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the news media can learn the names of police officers involved in shootings, a case of competing arguments over officers' safety and the public's right to information.
A state appeals court had ruled in February that the Los Angeles Times was entitled to the names of Long Beach officers involved in a December 2010 fatal shooting, and in all other shootings for the previous five years.
But the state's high court voted unanimously Wednesday to hear appeals by Long Beach and its Police Officers Association. No hearing date has been scheduled.
The court ruled in 2006 that the identities and records of police in disciplinary proceedings must be kept confidential, an exception to the law that makes most state and local government records public. The justices must now decide whether the exemption also applies to officers involved in shootings who are not in disciplinary proceedings.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/20/BA4C1O70UC.DTL
Currently, the California Supreme Court is unanimously with Republican nominees and had only one Democratic nominee justice (Carlos Moreno) from 2001 to 2011. Despite that partisan imbalance, the state high court notably overturned Prop. 22, a voter initiative passed excluding gay marriage from the state constitution, in 2008 (In re Marriage Cases. Eventually, voters reversed the court through Prop. 8, another initiative now taken down in federal court.
Also in 2011 (Martinez v. Regents of the University of California), the court unanimously rejected a challenge to the state law that allowed anyone (including undocumented immigrants) to go to the public universities with in-state tuition provided that that they graduated from a California high school they attended for at least 3 years. That court was with 5 Republicans, one Democrat.
