Newspaper fights Naval Academy for records

The Capital has spent three years fighting for Naval Academy records, and the battle is not close to being finished. In March 2006, the Maryland newspaper asked for documents on how the Naval Academy handled sexual misconduct cases and filed an FOIA request. After the academy said no such documents existed, the paper filed another FOIA request for which the academy used a privacy-concern excuse. The Capital hired an attorney, and the navy judge advocate general granted the newspaper's appeal in September 2008. However, The Capital has only received partial documents and none involving the sex abuse cases from 2007 and 2008. The newspaper has filed another request for these documents.

A seemingly simple question about whether the Naval Academy treated men and women fairly in sexual misconduct cases took three years and 3,000 pages of documents to only partially answer.

Getting these documents was not easy even though the Naval Academy is a publicly funded institution. It receives between $200 million and $300 million each year in taxpayer dollars, and applications from between 9,000 and 15,000 of the nation's young people annually.

The Capital became interested in the sex abuse cases after some midshipmen and academy graduates alleged in 2006 that there was a double standard of justice being meted out to male and female mids.

More here.