A South Carolina newspaper may be taking a city and the state’s top law enforcement agency to court next month.
The Aiken Standard filed a complaint in Aiken County Circuit Court on June 4 over dashboard camera footage that the S.C. State Law Enforcement Division has refused to release to any outlet.
The footage concerns a Feb. 9, 2014 incident where then-North Augusta Department Public Safety officer Justin Craven shot and killed an unarmed 68-year-old Edgefield County resident, Earnest Satterwhite Sr., as Satterwhite was sitting in his car. Satterwhite led Craven on a 13-mile police chase that began in North Augusta and ended when he pulled into his driveway in Edgefield County.
SLED and North Augusta denied the Standard’s Freedom of Information Act request in April and have continued to refuse public access to the video. In response to the FOIA request, city officials deferred to SLED and said it would not release the video because it was part of an ongoing investigation. That same month, Craven’s attorney, Jack Swerling of Columbia, filed a motion to suppress release of the video.
Officials with both SLED and North Augusta had no further comment when reached by phone.
Jay Bender of Baker, Ravenel & Bender, who represents the newspaper, said that the Associated Press would be joining the Aiken Standard in the complaint, as they have also attempted but been rejected access to the dashboard camera video as well.
“If the video has nothing on it that hurts the officer, then they would’ve released at the press conference a year ago to clear everybody involved,” Bender said. “So the fact that they have refused to release it, tells me there’s something on it they don’t want anybody to see.”
In a statement to his newspaper, the paper’s editor, Tim O’Briant, said the reasons for the city and SLED not releasing the video “just don’t hold water as far as the legal exceptions they’re allowed to claim.”
“In the end, I think it boils down to this video makes them look bad and they don’t want it out there,” O’Briant said in an Aiken Standard article on June 5. “No matter what charges Craven faces, if this video proved he did nothing wrong, they would have released it a year ago.”
Bender argued that the FOIA provision cited by SLED, exempting “the premature release of information to be used in a prospective law enforcement action,” is not applicable in this case. He cited a 1995 case where the Charleston Post-Courier had its FOIA request for a 911 tape denied on the same grounds and the state Supreme Court ruled that the tape was not exempt from disclosure.
“The law in this case was settled years ago,” Bender said. “They’re making up an exception that has already been specifically ruled in our favor in previous cases.”
Swerling’s motion asked Circuit Court Judge Thomas Russo to prohibit the release of any dashboard camera video and argued the video should only be viewed in a courtroom setting “so as not to influence any prospective jurors” before his client’s trial on the matter.
Craven was indicted in May on the felony charge of discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle. The charge against Craven, brought by SLED, is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. North Augusta settled a wrongful-death suit by paying $1.2 million to Satterwhite’s estate.
The defendants have 30 days to respond to the FOIA complaint before the matter heads to litigation.
Follow Matthew Stevens on Twitter @SCLWStevens