Aurora asks for dismissal of lawsuit over officer records given to imprisoned felon

Hannah Leone
Aurora Beacon-News
September 27, 2017

The city of Aurora and its former records manager are asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit alleging they released personal information on seven officers to a gang associate imprisoned because of their police work.

In a July complaint demanding a jury trial, lawyers for the officers stated the city wrongly released their private, personal and protected information in October 2015, mailing “largely unredacted” personnel files to the requester at Menard Correctional Center.

The city and former records manager Jo Ann Osberg last week jointly filed both an answer and a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in U.S. District Court. A memorandum supporting the dismissal motion stated both of the suit’s federal claims should be dismissed because there’s “no substantive due process right to ‘informational privacy.'”

Meredith Buckley and Seth Halpern, of Chicago-based law firm Malkinson & Halpern, filed the suit on behalf of John Munn, Darrell Moore, Marco Gomez, Armando Montemayor, Arturo Montemayor, Michael Nilles and Leonard Casamassimo, who are all officers or investigators with the Aurora Police Department, and their spouses and children.

John Murphey and Amber Samuelson of Rosenthal, Murphey, Coblentz & Donahue are representing both the city and Osberg in the case.

While Osberg was the city’s Freedom of Information Act manager, she didn’t have final policy-making authority for FOIA responses within the police department, according to the filings. Osberg was placed on paid administrative leave Dec. 12 and had a severance date of March 31, according to records in her personnel file.

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