Richard McKee, First Amendment activist, has died (*updated)

Richard McKee, the quiet chemistry professor who smiled as he chewed through walls of government secrecy, has died. He was 62.

Details of his death are murky. What little I know comes from a post written by Emily Francke at Californians Aware, a statewide First Amendment watchdog group McKee helped start:

It is with deep regret and a very heavy heart that I must report that our dear friend and colleague, Rich McKee, suddenly passed away today, April 23, 2011. I have no further details at this time, but I will share what I can as it becomes known to me in the coming days and weeks. 

Rich was one of our greatest champions throughout the years, and we truly could not have done any of this without him. I hope you will join me in sending support and prayers to his family and friends as they learn to cope with this incredible loss.

McKee fought every day to ensure California lived up to a simple and obvious idea. He believed the public has a right to know what the government it elected is doing. This meant more than reporting out a final vote after a closed door meeting, it meant giving the public the same information a legislative body relied on to come to a decision - before the decision was made. It meant giving the public the right to speak before government officials made up their minds. It meant taking officials to task when they tried to skirt the fundamental sunshine laws of the state. Control freaks in City Halls and County buildings across California buckled at his passion, because he knew what he was talking about, he was never demagogic, and he always had law on his side.

It was a simple idea, and yet McKee spent more than a decade fighting nearly identical battles in city after city, county after county, as craven government officials decided it was easier to conceal than to reveal. The salary scandal in the City of Bell - the one that won the Los Angeles Times a Pulitzer - shows what happens when people like McKee are not around. He not only fought his battles, but he fought countless battles on behalf of people who did not know they had rights.

Indeed, I would say that every City Hall reporter in California who has ever requested sensitive documents or emails in the last 13 years has Richard McKee to thank - either because he offered the reporter free advice, or because he fought at the reporter's side in court when officials said no, or because he left behind a legacy of court decisions that made the reporter's job easier. I know from experience.

He was genuine, he was good, and will be missed.

*Updated 4/25: The Daily Breeze has more on McKee's death, including the fact that he died of natural causes. The story also has a comment from Terry Francke, head of Californians Aware and former general counsel at the California First Amendment Coalition:

McKee died of natural causes Saturday at his La Verne home, according to Los Angeles County Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter. An autopsy is pending. Family members did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Francke described McKee as an outspoken and dedicated advocate for public participation in local government.

"He was a big guy in personality, in generousness and in enthusiasm for opening up government to public participation," Francke said. "He was very good humored and very gentlemanly. He was a skilled persuader."

McKee fought for public access to government records and documents and educated public officials in more than 100 cities across the state about open-meeting laws and the California Public Records Act. He filed nearly 30 lawsuits against public agencies in the last 16 years, winning the vast majority.

"Nixonian dragnet" in L.A. County

Open-government activist and attorney Terry Francke has penned a blistering column chastising the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for launching an investigation into leaks to the L.A. Times about the county's troubled child welfare agency.

Francke writes:

...the state’s largest county, which may be doing the state’s worst job in child welfare, is reacting to newspaper reports on the heartbreaking results of its failures by loosing the hounds to find who in its ranks furnished reporters with the facts.  In blithe dismissal of the Brown Act, the board of supervisors majority even initially used an unlawful closed session to hear, discuss and approve top bureaucrats’ request for the witch hunt.

The pretext for this Nixonian dragnet is that laws for the protection of minors’ privacy have been violated. While that may or may not be the case, the question pales beside the issue of whether those laws are anything more but a pious cover for the most secretive and potentially destructive archipelago of government power in today’s society—the joined-at-the-hip realm of the juvenile dependency court and child welfare systems.

Silence in the courtroom

A federal judge in Los Angeles "took the highly unusual step of closing a two-day trial" dealing with the killing of Jewish Defense League activist Earl Krugel. The LA Times reports:

Constitutional scholars and press-freedom advocates deemed the broad secrecy accorded the trial by U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson perplexing -- and a likely violation of the 1st Amendment.

Terry Francke at Californians Aware notes:

The Times apparently learned of this closure only after the fact. In the old days of an abundant reporting staff, that would not have happened, and Times lawyers would have almost certainly filed a challenge to the order immediately.

Anti-anti-SLAPP legislation in Sacramento

The California Legislature might not be able to fix our multi billion-dollar budget deficit, but a bill authored by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, would prevent courts from imposing debilitating penalties in good-government cases such as the one that saddled open-government activists Rich McKee and CalAware with tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

The legislation would bar government agencies from seeking repayment of attorney fees under the state's anti-SLAPP law when they are sued to produce public documents or to comply with public meeting requirements. Anti-SLAPP allows defendants to collect attorney fees when a court decides a case is without merit.

McKee and CalAware joined a lawsuit brought against Orange Unified School District for alleged violations of public meeting law. They lost the case and the court awarded the district more than $80,000 in attorney fees.