State ex rel. Copley Ohio Newspapers, Inc. v. Akron

Summary

The Ohio Supreme Court granted a writ of mandamus in part, ordering Akron to produce unredacted administrative‑leave and reinstatement notices and Walker incident reports with only the eight officers’ names redacted as uncharged suspects, while denying the newspaper’s request for unredacted personnel, discipline, and internal‑investigation files and rejecting statutory damages and attorney‑fee awards. The Court held that requests for those files were improper requests for information, not proper public‑records requests, and applied the confidential law‑enforcement investigatory records exception to protect officer identities.