LOCAL:

The Florida Department of Corrections is facing a lawsuit over its failure to provide its plans and procedures for protecting the state’s prisoners from the virus to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group.

The Florida Department of Corrections is now facing a lawsuit over its failure to make public its plans and procedures for protecting the state’s nearly 96,000 prisoners from the new coronavirus.

The suit, filed Thursday by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Leon County circuit court, alleges the FDC has yet to provide records the nonprofit legal advocacy group requested in late March.

“While FDC has acknowledged our request, it has provided very little information about its policies and procedures to deal with COVID-19,” said Shalini Goel Agarwal, senior supervising attorney for the Florida SPLC, in a statement. “The law does not allow FDC to respond when it feels like it because of the pandemic; because of the pandemic, FDC must comply now.”

According to the suit, the SPLC on March 20 requested, “All plans, policies, and procedures implemented by the Flor

ida Department of Corrections since November 1, 2019, relating to ‘Novel Coronavirus 2019’ or ‘COVID-19.’”

The group also asked for documentation of positive test results for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, in FDC facilities.

As of Friday afternoon, the FDC was reporting 1,033 positive tests among inmates and 231 among staff. Nine prisoners have died of COVID-19. An unidentified FDC spokesperson in an email Friday said the agency had not yet been served with the lawsuit.

Since the pandemic began, the FDC has been slow in releasing information about the spread of the coronavirus in the state’s prisons.

For weeks, data showing how many inmates had been tested, at which facilities and the results was not made public, despite repeated requests by advocacy groups and news organizations, including the Orlando Sentinel.

The FDC also refused to reveal which prisons housed inmates who had died, citing “privacy concerns,” though, after requests by the Sentinel and its attorneys, the health department released the information.

According to the SPLC lawsuit, in an April 13 phone call, the FDC said it was “uncertain as to when it would be able to provide a complete response to SPLC’s request, as FDC was ‘overwhelmed’ with requests.”

The Sentinel has also requested the FDC’s coronavirus plans, among other unfilled public record requests. Florida’s broad public records laws generally require records be made available without delay, other than the time needed to review them for exempt information.

The lawsuit asks a judge to require the FDC to immediately produce the records the SPLC requested.