Attorney General Rowe has not responded to the Phoenix’s repeated requests to discuss the matter.
A crack in the suicide black box
In spite of eyewitness allegations of guard wrongdoing in the death of Ryan Rideout, a 24-year-old mentally ill man who committed suicide in the Supermax on October 5, the Corrections Department and the Maine State Police — both of which say they have completed their investigations of the death — have refused to release information in response to Freedom of Access (freedom of information) requests by the Phoenix for investigative results (see “Sluggish Response to Suicide,” by Lance Tapley, January 5).
The Corrections refusal came in an e-mail to the Phoenix on January 22 from Diane Sleek. State police lawyer Christopher Parr said in a letter two days later he couldn’t give out information, citing prohibitions on the release of “intelligence and investigative information” if state-personnel records or “personal privacy” were compromised.
But on January 25, David Farmer, Governor Baldacci’s new communications director, said Corrections had told him that “action is pending” concerning a prison employee connected to the suicide, and this was the reason the reports couldn’t be released. Farmer said he couldn’t characterize the action and didn’t know how long it would be before the case was resolved.
The Freedom of Access law contains restrictions on the release of information about state-employee disciplinary actions stemming from misconduct allegations. Should the actions finally result in discipline, however, the result cannot be withheld from the public. (The Phoenix has asked to know the result, if that is the case.)
State Police Lieutenant Gary Wright, who oversaw his agency’s investigation of the Rideout case, and Jeffrey Rushlau, the midcoast district attorney, have said there are no plans for criminal charges in Rideout’s death.
Andrews Campbell, a lawyer working for the Rideout family on a wrongful-death suit against the state, is continuing with his investigation. He has hired a private detective to interview prisoners who were in the Supermax at the time of Rideout’s death, he said, and he will press to obtain the Corrections and state police investigation reports.
Bipartisan concern
Senator John Nutting, a Judiciary Committee Democrat who served on the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee in the last Legislature, said the Corrections Department “should be ashamed of themselves” for trying to place the restrictions it wanted on the press. “It’s very, very wrong. . . . The conditions [in the prison] need to be reported.”
Senator Peter Mills, a Republican primary gubernatorial candidate last year, thought the prison’s attempts at secrecy represented “a generic problem” in state government. Secrecy inevitably has negative results, he suggested, citing past scandals at the state’s Pineland Center for developmentally disabled people and Baxter School for the Deaf. “Every generation has to learn the lesson.”
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Lance Tapley: ltapley@adelphia.net
