Maryland's highest court has agreed to decide whether the NAACP should be allowed to see state police records of how the agency handled five years of motorists' complaints of racial profiling, none of which the agency found to be valid.
The Court of Appeals could upend a lower court ruling in the long-running "driving while black" dispute that ordered the disclosure of documents in about 100 complaints or could uphold it and allow the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to see the internal police records that the organization has been seeking since 2007.
The Court of Appeals, which took the case this month on a request by the Maryland attorney general's office, does not explain its choice of cases. Arguments are planned for November; the court has no deadline for issuing a ruling.
The attorney general's office, which represents the state police, contends that the investigation documents are personnel records exempt from disclosure, and that letting the ruling by the Court of Special Appeals stand "would effectively eliminate the confidentiality of many, if not most personnel records pertaining to employee discipline."
The ruling last winter that ordered the release of the records was a precedent-setting threat to the privacy of personnel records — not only for more than 15,000 law enforcement officers in the state, but for "all of Maryland's more than 330,000 state and local government employees, including those employed by the judiciary," the attorney general's office wrote.
NAACP lawyers said the attorney general's office was making "hyperbolic assertions" and argued that "if the [Maryland State Police] were to have their way, it could throw complaints of indisputably unconstitutional behavior in the trash can without any investigation, and no one would ever know."
The NAACP won its Public Information Act lawsuit to obtain the records first in Baltimore County and then at the Court of Special Appeals.
"We feel we will get the same results" before the Court of Appeals, said Gerald Stansbury, president of the Maryland State Conference of NAACP Branches. "We don't believe these are personnel documents that we cannot see."
The state police and the attorney general's office declined to comment.
The case is rooted in a traffic stop by a trooper 18 years ago and the resulting lawsuit, which was settled in 1995.