SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Utah Supreme Court justices have agreed not to weigh in on a dispute over whether Brigham Young University’s police are subject to hand over public records created before a new state open-records law was established, officials said.
The state Supreme Court ruling Wednesday shifts the legal dispute between Brigham Young University and The Salt Lake Tribune back to district court, The Salt Lake Tribune reported Wednesday.
The legal dispute stems from a 2016 records request filed by a Tribune reporter amid allegations that the university disciplined students who reported sex crimes because of violations to the school’s honor code prohibiting alcohol, tobacco, coffee and premarital sex.
The ruling also affects multiple other records disputes placed on hold pending the state Supreme Court decision, court officials said.
The question was important but there were major developments since first accepting the case in 2018 including the Legislature decision to subject university authorities to the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act in effect as of May 2019, Justice Paige Petersen said.
“The administration and interests of justice are not served by analyzing whether the University Police was a ‘governmental entity’ under the now-obsolete 2016 version of GRAMA,” Petersen said in a news release. “Now that the University Police’s status as a ‘governmental entity’ under GRAMA is beyond dispute, the parties might resolve the contested request without further litigation.”
District Judge Laura Scott is expected to decide whether the records in question should be considered public under state law, officials said. She ruled in The Tribune’s favor last July, saying the university is an arm of government when it acts as law enforcement, she said.
BYU appealed the decision to the Utah Supreme Court, officials said.
Emails between the police department and Honor Code Office employees were not released, university officials said. BYU has argued its police force was created and funded by a private entity and shouldn’t be covered under the law, officials said.
The Tribune has since submitted another request, officials said.
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