Court supports withholding reports

A trial judge properly denied The Spokesman-Review access to reports prepared for the Spokane School District when a third-grade boy died five years ago of a peanut allergy, the Washington Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.

The appellate court’s Spokane branch said Spokane County Superior Court Judge Jerome Leveque was right: The documents the newspaper sought are exempt from disclosure because they were prepared by a team of lawyers in anticipation of a lawsuit.

The disclosure law says public agencies aren’t required to release their lawyers’ “work product” documents, which may include the attorneys’ legal analysis and advice. Attorneys for The Spokesman-Review argued that the newspaper sought only facts and that any legal analysis could easily be redacted before the documents were released.

However, a three-judge appellate panel ruled, the documents “are imbued with the mental impressions, legal theories and confidential instructions of a team of lawyers” and investigators working to defend the school district.

The appeals court said it found no legal basis for the newspaper’s argument that the documents should have been prepared by the district itself, eliminating the exemption for attorney work product.

School district officials properly protected the public interest by engaging a team of lawyers and investigators immediately after 9-year-old Nathan Walters died in May 2001 after eating a peanut butter cookie during a Logan Elementary School field trip, according to the Court of Appeals. The district “correctly perceived that litigation involving potentially enormous liability was inevitable,” the court said.

The judges noted that Walters’ peanut allergy “was well known to the district’s food staff, the boy’s teacher and the organizers of the trip, including two school nurses and several parent volunteers.” Despite that, “peanut-laden” snacks were provided during a field trip and chaperones, not wishing to curtail the trip for other students, failed to take Walters to a hospital until it was too late to save him, the appellate judges wrote.

School officials released some documents, but the newspaper sought more, including an investigator’s notes of interviews with witnesses and the notes and reports of the district’s attorneys. The district and Walters’ family, which eventually accepted a settlement, persuaded Leveque to block release of the documents.