Date: July 12th, 2010
I know I've been writing a decent number of work entries, leaving those who are less legally inclined to be highly and rightfully bored out of their collective minds. However, this one is different. Mostly because I found myself pleasantly surprised by it. Now, I've been consistently shocked at how overly complicated the paperwork for a lot of proceedings has been. Especially the cases where our clients are applying for or appealing a denial of benefits. Those cases will just lose you in paperwork. I assumed, what with the double-secret-probation the whole freaking country has been on for the last ten years, that filing a Freedom of Information Act request would be the same complex nightmare as all those other things.
It was not.
Now, there's some hoops to be jumped through, but nothing even remotely inappropriate, as far as I'm concerned. What exactly did I have to do? Well, after spending the morning fretting because my boss told me we would be filing a FOIA request with the Lansing PD, I came to find out that it involved either a short letter or one of the simplest forms I'd ever seen.
How simple was the letter, you ask? Dear Lansing PD, please give us these records cause this law says you have to. Love and Kisses, Legal Services. That's pretty much it - that and identifying the records so they could find them. No motion before a judge, no complaint, no big hullabaloo or humdinger of a rough time. And. AND! We didn't even have to mail the darn thing. I faxed it. I didn't have to leave the joyful, sulfurous comfort of the Legal Services office.
Now. Granting you might be mildly confused about my choice of words there. Sulfurous doesn't really go with joyful, per say. Mostly, I wanted an excuse to complain about the office bathrooms, which smelled like someone died, got set on fire, died again, decomposed, got set on fire again, got put out with cow manure and then got thrown head first at the gates of Hell (which also smell bad in this scenario). But on the bright side, filing a FOIA request was super straightforward.
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