A Wyoming judge on Tuesday lifted a temporary restraining order that had prevented the Wyoming Tribune Eagle newspaper from publishing an article suggesting that Laramie County Community College’s president mishandled a situation during a 2008 student trip to Costa Rica. In lifting the order, which the college obtained last week, Judge Peter G. Arnold ruled that the college had failed to produce “any evidence” that release of information contained in a college report would put the institution in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and result in its losing federal funds. The article, published Wednesday morning, suggests that President Darrel Hammon and other college administrators should have sent home a student who was possibly suicidal, rather than allowing her to remain with other students and asking them to help supervise her.
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2 Responses to Wyo. Judge Lifts Restraining Order College Sought on Article Involving Its President
cwinton - May 26, 2010 at 4:30 pm
I’m glad to see the judge pulled back from what he must have realized after the fact was an ill-considered ruling. The question now becomes, why did LCCC take the untenable position of trying to suppress this report in the first place? One has to assume there may be more to this story than revealed in the report, since there is nothing particularly untoward revealed by it other than some rather poor judgment calls by Mr. Hammon. I assume the press will now seek to determine if the trip itself involved some questionable aspects not directly addressed in the report, since LCCC in seeking its suppression certainly has conveyed the impression that there is more going on here than meets the eye.
jffoster - May 26, 2010 at 8:27 pm
One note — I don’t disagree with Cwinton (1) in his appraisal of the outcome but the key initial in a TRO is T[emporary]. TROs are faily easily come by to stay and injoin an imminent action that facially might produce an irrevocable and irremediable harm. But to get them changed to permanant injunctions, more cause for probable harm must be shown. So it is unlikely the judge necessarily “pulled back” nor “realized” the TRO was at the time and facially an “ill-considered” ruling. In short, in both the issuance and the vacation of the TRO, the judge probably just did his job.