DA drops charges against publisher and lawyer who sought information on court reporter payment
A Georgia prosecutor moved to dismiss felony charges against a newspaper publisher and his lawyer last week after their controversial arrest spurred the Society for Professional Journalists to ask the state judicial ethics commission to investigate.
Publisher Mark Thomason and his lawyer, Russell Stookey, spent a night in jail after their arrest on June 24 in connection with their request for bank records of the Appalachian Circuit’s chief judge, Brenda Weaver, report Law.com and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Thomason wanted to find out if Weaver had used public funds to pay a court reporter’s legal fees when he sued her for a tape recording of court proceedings and she countersued for defamation, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in this prior column. The defamation claim was based on a story questioning whether the court reporter’s transcript was accurate. The court reporter’s lawyer is now a judge who is a colleague of Weaver’s.
At first Thomason tried to obtain the payment information with a public records request. “When that didn’t work,” the Journal-Constitution wrote, Thomason “got inventive and used a subpoena from ongoing litigation to demand the records from a bank.”
Thomason was charged with making a false statement for his claim in the records request that some checks may have been “cashed illegally,” according to the Journal-Constitution and the Associated Press. Both Thomason and Stookey were charged with identity fraud and attempted identity fraud; the indictment claimed they intended to “unlawfully appropriate” banking information belonging to Weaver, according to AP.
The prosecutor’s motion to drop charges included a letter from Weaver that she was concerned because she never got the required notice of the attempt to obtain banking records, and a copy of the subpoena posted on the internet had her checking account number and routing number still visible.
The SPJ’s request for an inquiry for the Judicial Qualifications Commission asked that its chief step aside in any investigation. The commission is led by Brenda Weaver.
