Publisher's Notebook

John Doe got sued this week.

He must screw up a lot, because he’s always getting sued.

Actually, whenever a lawyer needs to file a claim and isn’t sure quite whom to tag, she’ll file a suit against John Doe, particularly if there’s a statute of limitations about to run.

Once Doe is unmasked during discovery, the lawyer moves to amend and get the right person in the suit. The parties take it from there.

Was there ever a real historical John Doe? Doubtful. “John Doe” is “a fictitious name frequently used to indicate a person for the purpose of argument or illustration,” according to Black’s Law Dictionary.

It turns out John Doe has been used by lawyers as a placeholder name for centuries.

Michael Quinion, who writes on “international English from a British perspective” in the blog “World Wide Words,” says that Blackstone referred to John Doe in his “Commentaries on the laws of England” for 1765-69. And the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary take Doe back a century before that, with a reference in a 1659 document, “To prosecute the suit, to witt John Doe And Richard Roe.”

Ah, let’s not forget Richard Roe. He’s Doe’s sidekick, who shows up almost as often as Doe. He’s Sancho Panza to Doe’s Don Quixote. Sundance to his Butch. Barney Rubble to his Fred Flintstone. Doe and Roe could star in their very own buddy movie.

Think back to when you first met these guys, probably in law school. They appear in any number of legal hypotheticals, and in most of them, Doe always is suing Roe. Here’s hoping Roe takes it like a good No. 2 and has a good defense lawyer.

Even though we can’t place when John Doe was born, we can serve up some genealogy. The practice of creating fictitious persons to make a legal point dates back to Roman times. Roman lawyers had a guy named “Titius.”

Black’s says that “Titius” was “a proper name, frequently used in designating an indefinite or fictitious person, or a person referred to by way of illustration.”

Sounds like our friend John Doe. And for good measure, Titius had his own Richard Roe. The Romans used the name “Seius” as the second banana in their legal hypotheticals.

There actually are people named “John Smith” in the world (go no farther than Jamestown to see the big statue of Capt. John Smith). Anybody named John Doe?

Well, yes, at least one. A few years ago, a New York Times reporter went looking to answer that question and found Mr. Doe in the Upper West Side of New York City.

He is a Korean immigrant who came to the U.S. as a boy in the late 1970s. His name was Jang Do. Doe wanted an American-sounding name, so he changed “Jang” to “John” and persuaded his mom and dad to add an “e” to their surname. (So people would pronounce it like “tae kwon do,” not “hairdo,” he said). Yes, he said he’s heard all the jokes, and no, he said he does not have a wife named “Jane.”

Not explored was whether he had any friends named Roe.

If you’ve ever been trapped in a deposition from hell, you have company. Here’s the tale of some lawyers who take up 10 pages of a transcript trying to define “photocopy.”

Really.

It’s a public records case from Ohio, reported by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer by way of the WSJ Law Blog.

The entertainment got underway when a plaintiff’s lawyer deposed the head of IT for a county office.

Plaintiff’s lawyer asked simply, “During your tenure in the computer department at the Recorder’s office, has the Recorder’s office had photocopying machines?”

The defense lawyer immediately objected, for reasons not articulated.

And the guy who was being deposed responded, “When you say ‘photocopying machine,’ what do you mean?”

And it goes downhill from there. For 10 pages.

The best exchange:

The guy says that he just wants the plaintiff’s lawyer to give him an explanation of what he’s asking, “instead of trying to make me feel stupid.”

Plaintiff’s lawyer’s retort: “If you feel stupid, it’s not because I’m making you feel that way.”

Thanks to Baker McClanahan for the head’s-up.

The Fairfax County Police Department has earned a dubious honor: the department was a runner-up for the “Black Hole Award,” a distinction started this year by the Society of Professional Journalists for the “most heinous violations of the public’s right to know.”

The state of Utah was the winner of the Black Hole Award for its passage of a bill that the SPJ award committee called “the most regressive piece of freedom of information legislation in recent history.”

House Bill 477, signed into law earlier this month by Gov. Gary Herbert, makes major changes to the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act.

Starting July 1, anyone seeking information will pay heavy fees for search time, redaction, administrative overhead and legal review that will price citizens out of their government, the committee said.

Additionally, there is a requirement that someone seeking information must prove beyond a preponderance of the evidence that a public record should be public; every other state requires the government to prove it should be secret.

And there will be exemptions keeping a wide swath of electronic records secret, including text messages and other correspondence of officials, allowing government leaders to communicate in secret, according to the committee.

The Fairfax police department was one of five runners-up for the award.

The department was cited for its refusal to provide information on its handling of the shooting of a motorist by a police officer. In November 2009, an officer shot and killed an unarmed motorist on Richmond Highway. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information about the incident, Fairfax officials declined to release video footage of the shooting from police cruisers or copies of reports written in the wake of the shooting. Even the name of the officer remains shrouded in secrecy, said the committee.

After a 14-month internal investigation, the commonwealth’s attorney announced in January that he would not file criminal charges against the officer. In a press release, authorities suggested the driver, a carpenter and former Army Green Beret with bipolar disease, had ignored police lights and sirens before the officer fatally shot him. But the police department denied a request for public inspection of the actual reports, the committee concluded.

The other runners up were the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, for refusing to disclose information about the death of a toddler; the University of Maryland, for charging high copy fees to a student journalist investigating sexual assaults on campus; the CIA and Attorney General Eric Holder, for destruction of interrogation videos protected by the Federal Records Act; and the Broward County (Florida) School Board for keeping inadequate records.

Today is National FOI Day. March 16 is James Madison’s birthday, and that’s the reason this date was chosen, in a nod to the Father of the Constitution, as the day to observe the importance of freedom of information. The First Amendment Center has more information at its website, including the scoop on yesterday’s FOI Day Conference held at the Newseum in D.C.

Closer to home, Megan Rhyne, the executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, has an op-ed piece in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, in which she reports a welcome development: She said in her job she hears from a lot of people. But recently, she said, she’s been hearing from government workers and officials who want their offices open and information fully accessible to the public.

This week (March 13-19) is Sunshine Week, an initiative to promote open government and freedom of information. March 16, this Wednesday, is National FOI Day – and that day was chosen because it is James Madison’s birthday.

The week is spearheaded by the National Society of News Editors and underwritten by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Sunshine Week got started in 2002 in the Sunshine State, when the Florida news editors society banded together to fight efforts to create scores of exemptions to that state’s public records laws. Several other states followed suit in 2003; the ASNE went national with a sunshine celebration two years later.

Here in the Old Dominion, the Virginia Press Association and the Virginia Coalition for Open Government fight the good fight, and they were busy as usual during the 2011 General Assembly session.

According to the VPA website, there were at least 33 different bills relating to public access to government that were introduced during the session.

The VPA noted one of the bills it supported, House Bill 1457, will double the civil penalties for a willful violation of the Freedom of Information Act by government employees. The bill made it through both houses and awaits the governor’s signature.

And a number of bills that would have exempted various state agencies’ work from the purview of FOIA were killed in committee.

As part of Sunshine Week, the ASNE honors “Local Heroes” who fight for access and little-guy rights. The overall national winner was a woman in Miramar Beach, Fla., who filed a lawsuit against local officials and forced them to handle public records differently.

But Virginia can lay claim to the third-place finishers. A Waynesboro couple, Phil and Ellen Winter, took the bronze for their effort to straighten out practices in the city treasurer’s office. According to Sunshine Week officials, they noticed their property tax check had not been deposited promptly.

They then gathered reams of government documents that showed the treasurer had allegedly mishandled city and state money. They went to the local newspaper and shared their research. The treasurer lost his bid for reelection last fall.

Sunshine Week is a newspaper industry effort to insure that information remains free. The Society for Professional Journalists, for example, is a big promoter of the week and of FOIA education in general.

But this isn’t just inside baseball and an example of how journalists pat each other on the back so they can feel good. Far from it. The week highlights how the fourth estate can keep government honest and the citizens informed.

It was Thomas Jefferson who once famously said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Go to these two sites for a lot of information and resources: www.sunshineweek.org, maintained by the ASNE, and www.spj.org, the home site of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Let the sun shine.

No matter what your view on the controversy surrounding federal funding of National Public Radio, you’ve got to tip your hat to the headline-writers at the Wall Street Journal.

The latest news in the continuing story — NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller resigned in the wake of the release of a surveillance video in which another, now-departed NPR exec railed against the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement.

The Journal’s headline: “Video Kills the Radio Czar.”

Somewhere the Buggles (whose ”Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video ever played on MTV, back in 1981) are smiling.