The Chronicle

Issue date: 4/16/08 Section: News
Last update: 4/16/08 at 7:22 AM EST

Mike Easley

The Associated Press and 10 North Carolina news organizations including The (Raleigh) News & Observer sued Gov. Mike Easley Monday, accusing his administration of violating the state's Public Records Law by deleting several e-mails.

The complaint accuses Easley's administration of "the systematic deletion, destruction or concealment of e-mail messages sent from or received by the governor's office." The coalition alleges that Easley violated the law by telling his staff to instruct Cabinet agency employees to delete e-mails sent to and from his office.

According to the Public Records Law, all government e-mails concerning public business are public record and must be retained and provided upon request.

The suit alleges that the state Department of Cultural Resources, which oversees government records, allowed workers to delete e-mail messages they deemed to be of "short-term value."

The lawsuit states that Easley personally violated the law last month when he discarded a handwritten note from former state Health and Human Services Secretary Carmen Hooker Odom explaining why she did not talk publicly about efforts at mental health reform.

"If it needed to be saved, I would have saved it-if it had any kind of value to it at all," Easley said in a meeting last week with several newspaper editors of Hooker Odom's letter.

In the suit news outlets also ask Easley and his office to try to recover the deleted e-mails and provide access to them.

Easley's spokesman Seth Effron said the governor's office had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment.

In Easley's meeting last week with editors he noted that his office saves documents of administrative value but has the option of deleting those of no determined value. His office is not required by law to save anything without value, he added.

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