Chapter 73: The Request
The form was called a Request for Public Records and it was two pages long.
I filled out four of them before I got one right.
The first one I ruined because I wrote my name in the box for the name of the agency.
The second one I ruined because I used a pen that skipped.
The third one I ruined because I asked for everything.
That is the mistake people make. They ask for everything.
Then the custodian writes back and says the request is not reasonably described.
And you have lost nine weeks.
The fourth one asked for four things.
One. The Crash Reconstruction Unit final report, Troop C, incident number 22-0339, dated on or after March 9.
Two. Any supplement, addendum, or appendix to that report.
Three. The vehicle inspection worksheet for the silver Ford Taurus sedan, license plate ending in 4471.
Four. The disposition record showing what happened to that vehicle after it left the impound lot.
I did not ask for photographs. I wanted them. I did not ask.
Marisol had told me the rule in my first week, while I fed bail applications into the scanner.
“Ask for less than you want,” she said. “Then ask again.”
The fee schedule was on the back. Twenty-five cents a page for the first fifty pages. Fifteen cents after.
Certification, five dollars a document.
Staff research time, thirty-two dollars an hour, billed in quarter hours, waived for the first half hour.
I did the arithmetic on the back of a deposit slip.
If the report was ninety pages, I owed $18.50.
If they charged me two hours of research time, I owed $82.50.
I had $61 in the credit union and $19 in cash and rent on the room at the halfway house was due on the fourteenth.
I sent the request anyway, certified mail, return receipt, $8.15 at the window.
The clerk at the post office asked if I wanted insurance. I said no. She said it was only two dollars more.
“No,” I said again.
I kept the green card when it came back. It had a signature on it that looked like the word “Hoyt” written by somebody in a moving vehicle.
That was March 2. I wrote the date on an index card and put the card in the front of a cardboard folder I had taken out of the recycling bin at work. The folder had somebody else's client number on the tab. I crossed it out and wrote nothing over it.
The statute gave them five business days to acknowledge and twenty to produce or claim an exemption.
On day five I got a letter that said the request had been received.
On day twenty I got a letter that said the request required additional time due to the volume and complexity of the responsive material and that a further response would issue within thirty days.
Volume and complexity. Four items.
I read that letter eleven times.
Not because it was hard. Because reading it was the only part of the process I controlled.
At work I scanned the file of a man named Dwight Ferro, who had skipped on a $15,000 bond.
It was 212 pages. I did it in fifty-five minutes.
Marisol came out of her office with a coffee she had made four hours earlier and never drunk.
“You sent it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Under your own name.”
“Yes.”
She put the coffee down on the corner of my desk, which she does when she is about to say something she has decided not to soften.
“Then you already lost.”
I stopped the feeder.
“Explain it.”
“You're a convicted felon requesting the file on your own conviction,” she said. “There's no exemption for that. There doesn't need to be. There's just a man named Hoyt with a stack of forty requests and a supervisor who told him to do the easy ones first.”
“That isn't law.”
“No,” Marisol said. “It's staffing.”
She picked the coffee back up and did not drink it.
“Send it again in June,” she said. “And in September. Papering them is legal. Costs you postage.”
I asked her what it costs them.
“Nothing,” she said. “That's the point. Nobody ever wins one of these by being right.”
I went back to the feeder and did the last forty pages of Dwight Ferro.
That night I wrote the second request in pencil so I could correct it, then in pen, and I put it in the folder with the index card and the green return receipt.
Thirty-one days later the response came. It was a single sheet.
It said the Crash Reconstruction Unit final report for incident 22-0339 was available for inspection and copying at a cost of $41.75.
It also said that Appendix C had been destroyed pursuant to the agency retention schedule.
I did not know yet what Appendix C was.
I knew that they had told me it existed.