By Steve Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
SALT LAKE CITY — A former prison employee says her coworker would have never known about the $1,500 worth of calls she made from her personal phone to a paroled prisoner in Tonga if his wife hadn’t worked at the phone company.
In a federal lawsuit, Lauren Barker said Kirk Dahl passed along the gossip to three people at the prison.
Barker sought $300,000 in damages from Dahl, but U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell said the information Dahl passed on from his spouse, a former Manti Telephone Co. employee, didn’t amount to an invasion of privacy.
Campbell ruled the information was neither publicly disclosed nor highly offensive -- two standards that must be met under the invasion of privacy standard.
Barker’s lawyer, Russ Monahan, argued this was not a case of simple gossip and called the standards too restrictive.
Assistant Attorney General Tim Evans, who defended Dahl in the lawsuit, agreed with the ruling and said it would be extreme to prosecute “idle chatter.”
Dahl’s wife and the phone company were also named in the lawsuit, but settled the case out of court.
Barker was working as a rehab specialist at the Gunnison Prison when she was placed on administrative leave in May 2006. She resigned two weeks later, after the Department of Corrections began investigating her long-distance calls and the nature of her relationship with former prisoners.
Barker eventually acknowledged that she had “fraternized” with parolees, including the one released to Tonga. But in an August 2006 letter, Barker wrote to a Corrections investigator and the governor, to detail a broader culture of misconduct at the prison under which other workers were not being held accountable for their actions.
Copyright 2009 The Salt Lake Tribune