This is an opinion column.
Despite its name, the Golden Padlock Award isn’t particularly shiny. It’s heavy, as trophies go, and its metal parts are covered in the sort of film that collects on tools left too long in a storage shed.
In fact, the only part that glitters is an engraved brass plate explaining what this thing is and who it’s for.
“In acknowledgment of the dedication to secrecy and impressive skill in information suppression by officials working tirelessly to keep vital knowledge hidden from the public,” it says.
The Golden Padlock Award isn’t an honor, you see. It’s a distinction given each year by the association of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) to the worst public records and government transparency scofflaw. Each year, investigative reporters from across the country nominate the most secretive public officials and government entities for the prize.
And this year that distinction went to Huntsville, Alabama.
A little disclosure here: Some of my colleagues at AL.com nominated Huntsville City Hall and the Huntsville Police Department for the Golden Padlock. But that’s not to say Huntsville was set up. It earned this award and the competition was fierce. This year, the finalists included:
- The State of Arizona, which has paid more than $4 million in fines (so far) rather than obey a court order to disclose records related to its 2020 election audit.
- The US Food and Drug Administration, which slowed the release of vaccine review data to such a crawl it would have taken 50 years to fulfill one Freedom of Information Act request.
- The Utah Department of Corrections which attempted to hide how each month it had lost track of about 300 violent parolees, including rapists and murderers.
- The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which fought with its own journalism department faculty over public records, including documents that showed the university secretly tried to access faculty members’ hard drives without telling them.
And those were just the other finalists, the best of many more nominees.
“In a year that featured a startling array of nominations detailing egregious acts of secrecy by governments across the country, this case stood out,” said Robert Cribb, chair of the IRE’s Golden Padlock committee. “This footage, created in the public interest, provided crucial details for a murder case. The intransigence showed by the city and police undermined the public’s right to know in ways that earned this honor.”
Last year, a Madison County jury convicted Huntsville Police Officer William Ben Darby for murdering Jeffery Parker, a suicidal man who had called the police department for help. In the years between the murder and the trial, Huntsville police and city officials said Darby had done nothing wrong and paid $125,000 of taxpayer money toward his legal defense.
Meanwhile, the city repeatedly refused to let the public see bodycam footage of what Darby had done, and city council members approved paying Darby’s legal fees without seeing the film themselves.
And the city refused to release the footage despite Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle having said before that situations like this were exactly what the bodycams were for.
“The interesting thing is the public can trust everything that is being done because we record it,” Battle said when the city bought the cameras in 2015. “Having that bodycam there, having the police video there record what actually happens, and when people come in with complaints against Huntsville police officers, they get to see the action that actually happened and they get to see what they said and they get to see what the police officers said.”
But when it came time to put up, the city shut up.
Huntsville refused multiple public information requests. After the footage had been used in court during Darby’s trial, AL.com asked the judge to release the exhibits to the public. To the end, the city fought the release.
However, the judge saw the value of the footage as public record and ordered it made public.
Those recordings showed Darby pushing past two other police officers, one of whom had been calmly trying to talk Parker down, yelling at Parker to put down his gun, and within seconds, shooting Parker in the face with a shotgun.
Should you watch that video, you’ll see what the jury saw.
And you’ll see what Huntsville City Hall never wanted you to see — that for nearly three years, city officials covered for and made excuses for a murderer on its police force. The mayor and police chief even disagreed with the jury after the verdict came out, while still refusing to share the video.
I was at the awards presentation Saturday when the winner was announced. When Cribb told the crowd of about 1,400 attendees — folks who have seen some secrecy scofflaws themselves — what Huntsville had done, there were gasps and murmurs.
As is the tradition, IRE sent Battle and now-former Police Chief Mark McMurray invitations to accept the award. Neither responded, Cribb said, and neither showed at the ceremony.
When I left the ballroom, Saturday the musty old padlock sat by itself on a folding table on the stage, ready to return for another year in storage.
That’s too bad. Huntsville worked hard for that trophy. They earned it, and they should claim it.
Tommy Battle, come get your prize.
Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group, 2020 winner of the Walker Stone Award, winner of the 2021 SPJ award for opinion writing, and 2021 winner of the Molly Ivins prize for political commentary.
You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.
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