By Olivia Mitchell, cleveland.com Express Desk
cleveland.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Supreme Court ruled today that a privately run prison must pay an inmate $4,000 for failing to release public records, including surveillance camera footage.
The court ordered Lake Erie Correctional Institution to pay Devin Howard $2,000 in statutory damages for withholding surveillance footage from two encounters with correctional officers and another $2,000 for denying other public records requests.
Howard filed his lawsuit on April 7, 2025, two days before House Bill 265 took effect. The bill amended Ohio’s Public Records Act to bar inmates from recovering statutory damages in public records cases.
The court found the prison, operated by CoreCivic, properly denied five of Howard’s nine records requests but failed to fulfill four others within the required timeframe. The court awarded the maximum $1,000 per violation.
Howard had requested surveillance and body camera footage from an August 2024 incident in a dayroom and an October 2024 encounter near the prison library. Laura Sackett, the prison’s public records coordinator, denied the surveillance footage requests, calling them “security records” exempt from disclosure. As for the body camera footage, Sackett said in an affidavit that she told Howard that footage did not exist.
The court rejected that argument, citing its 2018 ruling in State ex rel. Rogers v. Dept. of Rehab. & Corr. that prisons must explain how records are actually used for security purposes rather than making “bare allegations.”
“Sackett’s descriptions of how an inmate could make nefarious use of surveillance-camera footage are not enough,” the court wrote.
The prison also must provide Howard with a funds transfer form and unredacted emails between prison staff and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. Sackett had redacted work phone numbers and email addresses from the emails, but the court said no law authorizes such redactions.
Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy, joined by Justice Jennifer Brunner, dissented in part, arguing Howard should receive $7,000 in damages. Kennedy argued Howard should have received records with the following information: a prison case manager’s schedule and time logs, the companies that provide the prison’s email and phone services, and definitions in the prison’s body camera policy governing the activation of cameras and retention of recordings.
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