Court: City doesn't have to disclose porn viewers

BILLINGS — The Montana Supreme Court ruled the city of Billings doesn’t have to reveal the identities of five employees disciplined last year for looking at pornography and other adult material on their work computers.

The ruling, delivered Friday, overturns a decision last year by a judge in Yellowstone County District Court.

That decision would have given the employees’ names and disciplinary records to The Billings Gazette.

But in Friday’s split decision, the state’s highest court said there isn’t enough public interest to justify releasing the information.

The newspaper had gone to court arguing that releasing the information would promote fairness and help stop cronyism.

But if people don’t like how Billings handled the situation, the justices wrote, they already have enough information to complain publicly.

“To hold that the general interests of ‘fairness and prevention of cronyism,’ absent any allegations that such has occurred, is sufficient to outweigh an employee’s privacy interest would open all public employment decisions to public scrutiny,” Justice Jim Rice wrote in the court’s opinion.

The city provided some details of the investigation last summer to the newspaper but withheld information that could have been used to identify the employees.

The Gazette had sued the city for the information.

Justices Mike McGrath, Michael E. Wheat, Beth Baker and Brian Morris backed the ruling.

Meanwhile, Justices Laurie McKinnon and Patricia O. Cotter dissented, saying Yellowstone County District Court Judge Russell Fagg’s ruling in the case was appropriate.

In the 15-page dissent written by McKinnon, they objected to the majority’s decision not to factor in some of the disciplined employees’ positions of power when making their ruling.

McKinnon also wrote that public humiliation, while perhaps an unfortunate consequence of the release of such information, was no defense against disclosing the identities of the employees who inappropriately used taxpayer resources to view sexually explicit material.