The President of the United States summons the nation to church on Thanksgiving Day to give thanks to "Almighty God" for the abundant harvest and all other blessings. But what has Almighty God -- I have no desire to appear irreverent -- what has Almighty God as a personal being to do with the harvests? If it is he who produces our crops, then being Almighty there should never be a failure of crops. But since crops frequently fail, it follows that there is no Almighty person in charge of them -- unless he brings failure purposely. Therefore, if God is to be thanked for large crops, he must be blamed when the crops are a failure. . . . If God sends the rain and the sunshine which develops and ripens our wheat, who sends the storms and the insects which destroy much of it? And if he sends both, then why not thank him for one and blame him for the other?-John Dietrich - (Added by: salon)
I occassionally get mugshots to go along with the sheriff's logs that are posted elsewhere on this blog. Because, as most people know, quite a few newspapers and television stations get mugshots of new arrests, I assumed there would be no problem with doing so here in Somervell County. After all, neighboring county newspapers, to include the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Bosque County News, Stephenville Empire Tribune, Cleburne Times-Review and Waco Tribune post articles about new arrests and quite often have the mugshot of the person arrested to accompany the article.
Not so for Somervell County. For whatever reason, Somervell County Sheriff's Department has decided that only mugshots for those who have been convicted (that is, already through the court process and adjudicated) are available through open record. The critieria used has been to look to see which cases are open or closed, and, if closed, what the outcome was. Besides the obvious fact that I would like to have access to mugshots upon arrests (with exceptions for minors, for example), I was being charged for the time it took to research whether the cases were open or not.
As you can read, the AG said that the charges were not appropriate; that while the Somervell County has discretion not to release mughots if they don't want to, IF they choose not to, they can't charge for the research. "Because section 552.108 is discretionary, the sheriff's office may not charge labor time to determine which cases are still open and which cases are closed. Therefore, the only charges allowed are $.10 for each page released."
I spoke with the AG's office about this, and while disappointed that withholding mugshots is discretionary, I was told that should the sheriff's office give a mugshot at any time to any other entity, including other people, newspapers, media, etc, they would have to then release them for everyone, because they cannot make exceptions to their discretionary rule only for some. Therefore if, for example, i know for sure that a newspaper in town has a mugshot that was given them by the Sheriff's Department, while a case was open, they would have to supply them to anyone who asks.
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