Colleen Murphy has served as the executive director of the Freedom of Information Commission in Connecticut since 2005.
Murphy has worked at the Commission since 1990, starting as a staff attorney, and also serving as the managing director for the commission. She is a member of the board for the Connecticut Foundation for Open Government, and the National Freedom of Information Coalition, and has spoken widely on the topic of open government laws.
Interview by Ben Martin SCSU JRN ‘25. Answers have been condensed and edited.
What is the importance of FOI laws?
I learned early on how important open government is to democracy, that although there’s really nothing in the U.S. Constitution, or even the state Constitution, that specifically speaks to it, it is so important for citizens to know, to be informed about their government in order to make good decisions about where they want their government to go. And if you don’t have state and federal laws to ensure that, there’s a risk that citizens will not have those tools and will be left in the dark.
What makes Connecticut’s FOI Commission unique?
It provides the place for citizens to come file complaints. They get a full blown hearing, an adjudicated hearing. It’s like a court proceeding, except we like to think it’s much more user friendly than that. People get a place to come air those access disputes. You don’t need a lawyer to come with you, and you’ll get a decision from the commission that is binding on the agency.
So many states don’t have situations like that.
Do you have any specific FOI complaints or hearings that stand out to you?
It’s old now, but one that stands out and I think is a testament to the strength of our agency involves a complaint against then candidate for governor, John Rowland. And there had been some issue at the home of his former spouse and the police had been called, and there was a record of that incident. An election was on its way, so the public was interested in what that was about. That somebody running for the highest office in our state, should the public know what might be characterized as a private incident? And so in the end, actually, the commission ordered disclosure of that record. But we lost; The court ruled that it should not be disclosed. And that was, from our viewpoint, not a good outcome.
But it demonstrated the strength of our agency in terms of the ability to combat political pressures and to put our heads down and rule the way we believe we should rule. It really helped us demonstrate our independence and show that we wouldn’t take sides. And our commissioners voted the way they felt that they should vote.
As the Internet keeps progressing, has the FOI Commission adapted its definition of a document?
I think the definition is broad enough, because it talks about information relating to the conduct of the public’s business, in whatever format. And even though it hasn’t changed much since 1975, when the law passed, because it kind of has that catch-all phrase that’s enabled us to deal with the new forms of records. The challenge is when they’re using personal devices to do things versus their public equipment. That’s where the struggle is in this electronic world. This public/private notion and the idea that if somebody is using their private device, then it’s private.
But in Connecticut it’s treated as content based. Because we do have these broad definitions, we’re pretty well equipped to deal with what has come and what’s coming in the future.
What do bad open government laws look like?
What we find is that almost any legislator will tell you: “Oh, I really believe in open government, but not in this situation.” So what happens, typically if there’s an individual issue, a legislator may want to change the law. It typically happens in a police situation.
We saw it in the aftermath, unfortunately, of the awful Sandy Hook [school shooting] episode where legislators were really concerned, and legitimately so, for the families. They were worried that our law was too broad and would allow people who had ill intent to share information about that awful episode and deliver more pain to the families.
There was this widespread desire to restrict access to information.
Even though this situation is the most horrific situation that one could picture, you don’t want to start restricting access to police records because you want to make sure that there’s police accountability to prepare for any kind of future episode.
We had to fight in a very difficult situation to try to keep police records open as much as possible and to point out that it’s not good to make a knee jerk reaction in a critical time. That’s kind of a big example, but there’s always tensions that we’re fighting against, and educating legislators on what the law already says and that we already have provisions that cover that situation. We have to look at every bill because even though we have this very discreet area that we’re working on, it impacts all of government.
