The Ohio Supreme Court has ordered Lake Erie Correctional Institution to pay inmate Devin Howard $4,000 in statutory damages after ruling the private prison improperly withheld surveillance footage and other public records he requested going back to 2024. The court also rejected the prison's claim that some body-camera footage simply did not exist, and it compelled the facility to hand over records it had redacted, including staff phone numbers and email addresses.
According to Cleveland.com, Howard had requested surveillance and body-camera footage from an August 2024 incident in a dayroom and from an October 2024 encounter near the prison library. Laura Sackett, the prison's public-records coordinator, denied the surveillance-footage requests, calling the footage security records exempt from disclosure, and told Howard the body-camera footage from one of the incidents did not exist at all. The Ohio Supreme Court rejected both justifications, finding the prison had failed to fulfill four of Howard's nine records requests within the required timeframe, even as it also found the prison had properly denied five of his other requests.
Court Cites 2018 Precedent on Security Claims
The court's ruling leaned on its 2018 decision in State ex rel. Rogers v. Dept. of Rehab. & Corr., which held that prisons cannot rely on broad or hypothetical security assertions to withhold surveillance video and must instead explain how the records are actually used for security purposes. Writing for the majority, the court said Sackett's descriptions of how an inmate could make nefarious use of surveillance-camera footage were not enough, and it rejected bare allegations as sufficient justification for withholding the footage.
Lake Erie Correctional Institution, located in Conneaut and operated by CoreCivic, must pay $2,000 in statutory damages for withholding surveillance footage from the two encounters with correctional officers, plus another $2,000 for denying other public-records requests, per the court's order. Under Ohio Revised Code Section 149.43(C)(2), statutory damages for public records delays run at $100 per business day starting from the date a mandamus lawsuit is filed, capped at $1,000 per qualifying request once an agency's noncompliance stretches past 10 business days, according to CaseMine. The Ohio Supreme Court awarded the maximum $1,000 per violation across four qualifying requests.
A Timing Quirk That Made the Payout Possible
Howard filed his lawsuit on April 7, 2025, exactly two days before Ohio Substitute House Bill 265 took effect. Sponsored by Representatives Scott Wiggam and Thomas Hall, the law amended Ohio's Public Records Act to bar inmates from recovering statutory damages in public-records cases going forward, meaning any similar lawsuit filed today would not qualify for the kind of payout Howard secured. Because his petition landed just two days ahead of that cutoff, his claim proceeded under the prior legal standard that still allowed monetary damages for incarcerated litigants.
The timing carries extra weight given Howard's history with the courts. Just months before this ruling, the Ohio Supreme Court had ruled against him in a separate case, State ex rel. Howard v. Chief Inspector's Office, holding on April 23, 2026, that public records requests embedded inside internal inmate grievance appeals do not trigger an agency's disclosure duties, according to FindLaw Caselaw. In that earlier matter, Howard had sought a case manager's schedule and departmental policies attached to a property damage grievance. Court filings show Howard, identified by inmate number A770357 and earning $12 per month in state pay, filed his mandamus petition pro se along with an affidavit of indigency to waive court fees.
Court Divided Over How Much the Prison Owes
The court's per curiam opinion, 2026-Ohio-3354, was not unanimous. Justices Patrick F. Fischer, R. Patrick DeWine, Joseph T. Deters, Daniel R. Hawkins, and Megan E. Shanahan formed the majority, while Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy and Justice Jennifer Brunner dissented in part, according to Court News Ohio. Kennedy argued Howard should have received $7,000 in damages rather than $4,000, along with additional records the majority declined to order, including the case manager's schedule and time logs, definitions governing camera activation and recording retention in the prison's body-camera policy, and the identities of companies providing the prison's email and phone services. Brunner joined Kennedy's partial dissent.
Beyond the monetary award, the court issued a writ of mandamus requiring the prison to turn over an unredacted funds transfer form and unredacted emails between prison staff and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. Sackett had redacted work phone numbers and email addresses from those emails, but the court said no law authorizes redacting the work contact details of public employees.
The Private Prison Behind the Case
Lake Erie Correctional Institution holds a notable place in Ohio history: in 2011, Ohio became the first state in the nation to sell a state-owned prison facility to a private corporation, transferring the Conneaut facility to CoreCivic, then known as Corrections Corporation of America, under a 20-year operational contract, according to the ACLU of Ohio. Under its current operating contract with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, CoreCivic receives a per-diem rate of $48.51 per inmate at the facility, with the state guaranteeing payment for at least 95 percent of its 1,618-bed capacity, per Grokipedia's summary of ODRC contract terms.
With House Bill 265 now in force, Howard's case stands as one of the last of its kind: an inmate who forced a private prison operator to pay statutory damages for stonewalling public records requests. Any Ohio inmate filing a similar mandamus lawsuit today can still seek a writ ordering the release of records, but the law now bars them from recovering the monetary damages that made Howard's win, however narrow the timing that allowed it, worth something in dollars as well as disclosure.
