When Pashman Stein Walder Hayden P.C. partners CJ Griffin and Samuel J. Samaro received the unanimous decision in North Jersey Media Group Inc. v. Twp. of Lyndhurst, 229 N.J. 541 (2017), from the New Jersey Supreme Court on July 11, 2017, it was clear that this hard-fought matter was a landmark case that would have significant impact on transparency about the use of force by police in the state of New Jersey. The Court had granted access via the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) and common law to police records and dash cam footage of a high-speed police chase and the fatal use of force on ...
Last week, Bergen County Assignment Judge Bonnie J. Mizdol issued an opinion finding that the Borough of North Arlington unlawfully imposed a special service charge upon a records requestor who sought records from the Borough's Facebook pages.
The OPRA request at issue in Wronko v. North Arlington sought the list of individuals who had been banned from the Borough's Facebook page, as well as a list of any words that had been censored and the list of page administrators. In response, the Borough insisted it needed to use an outside IT consultant to capture the screenshots necessary to ...
