September 26, 2011

Ms. P. Armstrong

Assistant City Attorney

Criminal Law and Police Section

City of Dallas

1400 South Lamar

Dallas, Texas 75215

OR2011-13891

Dear Ms. Armstrong:

You ask whether certain information is subject to required public disclosure under the Public Information Act (the "Act"), chapter 552 of the Government Code. Your request was assigned ID# 436012 (ORR# 2011-7855).

The Dallas Police Department (the "department") received a request for information relating to a specified arrest of a named individual. You claim the requested information is excepted from disclosure under sections 552.101 and 552.108 of the Government Code. We have considered the exceptions you claim and reviewed the information you submitted. ⁽¹⁾

Section 552.101 of the Government Code excepts from disclosure "information considered to be confidential by law, either constitutional, statutory, or by judicial decision." Gov't Code § 552.101. This exception encompasses common-law privacy and excepts from disclosure private facts about an individual. See Indus. Found. v. Tex. Indus. Accident Bd., 540 S.W.2d 668 (Tex. 1976). Information is excepted from required public disclosure by a common-law right of privacy if the information (1) contains highly intimate or embarrassing facts, the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person, and (2) is not of legitimate concern to the public. Id. at 685.

In Open Records Decision No. 393 (1983), this office concluded that generally only that information that either identifies or tends to identify a victim of sexual assault or other sex-related offense may be withheld under common-law privacy; however, because the identifying information was inextricably intertwined with other releasable information, the governmental body was required to withhold the entire report. ORD 393 at 2; see Open Records Decision No. 339 (1982); see also Morales v. Ellen, 840 S.W.2d 519 (Tex. App.--El Paso 1992, writ denied) (identity of witnesses to and victims of sexual harassment was highly intimate or embarrassing information, and public did not have a legitimate interest in such information); Open Records Decision No. 440 (1986) (detailed descriptions of serious sexual offenses must be withheld).

The submitted information is related to an alleged sexual assault, and the requestor knows the name of the alleged victim. We believe that, in this instance, withholding only identifying information from the requestor would not preserve the victim's common-law right to privacy. We therefore conclude the department must withhold all of the submitted information from this requestor under section 552.101 of the Government Code in conjunction with common-law privacy. As we are able to make this determination, we need not address your claim under section 552.108 of the Government Code.

This letter ruling is limited to the particular information at issue in this request and limited to the facts as presented to us; therefore, this ruling must not be relied upon as a previous determination regarding any other information or any other circumstances.

This ruling triggers important deadlines regarding the rights and responsibilities of the governmental body and of the requestor. For more information concerning those rights and responsibilities, please visit our website at http://www.oag.state.tx.us/open/index_orl.php, or call the Office of the Attorney General's Open Government Hotline, toll free, at (877) 673-6839. Questions concerning the allowable charges for providing public information under the Act must be directed to the Cost Rules Administrator of the Office of the Attorney General, toll free, at (888) 672-6787.

Sincerely,

James W. Morris, III

Assistant Attorney General

Open Records Division

JWM/em

Ref: ID# 436012

Enc: Submitted documents

c: Requestor

(w/o enclosures)

Footnotes

1. This letter ruling assumes the submitted representative sample of information is truly representative of the requested information as a whole. This ruling neither reaches nor authorizes the department to withhold any information that is substantially different from the submitted information. See Gov't Code §§ 552.301(e)(1)(D), .302; Open Records Decision Nos. 499 at 6 (1988), 497 at 4 (1988).

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