The FOIA (MCL 15.231 et seq.); Order requiring the defendant (MSU) to reveal the redacted names of student-athletes listed as suspects in incident reports requested by the plaintiff (ESPN); The privacy exemption in MCL 15.243(1)(a); Michigan Fed’n of Teachers v. University of MI; Rataj v. Romulus; State News v. Michigan State Univ.; Mager v. Department of State Police; Practical Political Consulting, Inc. v. Secretary of State; Detroit Free Press, Inc. v. Southfield; Whether disclosure of the information would constitute “a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy”; United States Dep’t of Def. v. Federal Labor Relations Auth.; Department of Justice v. Reporters Comm. for Freedom of the Press

The court held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in balancing the public’s interest in understanding how defendant-MSU’s police department handles criminal investigations involving student-athletes against the student-athletes’ privacy interests and determining that the balance favored disclosure of their names. Thus, it affirmed the trial court’s order requiring MSU to disclose the names of the student-athletes at issue to plaintiff-ESPN. ESPN submitted a request under FOIA asking MSU to provide “incident reports involving a list of student-athletes over a specific period of time.” MSU produced “two sets of records, but redacted the names and identifying information of the suspects, victims, and witnesses.” The trial court ordered MSU “to disclose the names of the suspects if they were one of the 301 student-athletes identified by ESPN in its request.” The issue on appeal was the applicability of MCL 15.243(1)(a), which has two prongs that both must be met for the exemption to apply. The court noted that the issue was “not whether the names of the suspects in the reports amount to information of a personal nature, but whether the revelation of the names when coupled with the information in the reports constitutes information of a personal nature and, if so, whether the method for protecting the private information was minimally sufficient to avoid an unwarranted invasion of privacy.” However, it was unnecessary here “to examine individually each report to ascertain whether the report includes information of a personal nature about the student-athletes who were identified as suspects.” Even if the reports revealed such information, “the trial court did not err when it determined that the disclosure of the information did not constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy under the second prong of the test.” The court concluded that “even if revealing the names of the student-athletes in the context of the reports amounts to the revelation of information of a personal nature, that revelation is not unwarranted.” Rather, “the public’s interest in government accountability must prevail ‘over an individual’s, or a group of individuals’, expectation of privacy.’”