Episode
Brendan Kirby, FOX10 News Investigative Reporter, on Grand Jury Secrecy, Body Camera Records, and Alabama's Open Records Act
- Published
- Aug 12, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4022
- Processing state
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Summary
A Justice Wrote a Warning Into His Own Ruling. Alabama Ignored It. In October of 2023, in a small town on the Alabama–Florida line, a newspaper publisher and one of her reporters were arrested and charged with felonies over a story about how federal COVID relief money had been spent at the local school system. Four centuries after the fight this week is about, the limit is written down. The arrest happened anyway. This is the Thursday conversation that closes week nine of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Sunday brought the written article. Saturday told the history of the Levellers, the printers and pamphleteers who wanted the limits on power written down and published without anyone’s permission. Tuesday carried it into the present. Today we close the week with a living voice — because rather than theorize about the distance between a document and its enforcement, it seemed better to ask a man who measures that distance for a living. Brendan Kirby is an investigative reporter with FOX10 News in Mobile, Alabama. He has covered courts and government for three decades, beginning in Washington and Maryland and, since 2000, on the Gulf Coast, including fifteen years at the Mobile Press-Register and AL.com. He is a graduate of American University and the author of Wicked Mobile, a history of the rogues and scoundrels of the Port City’s three hundred years. His beat straddles two states with nearly identical open records statutes and completely different habits about obeying them. The conversation runs along two threads. The first is what it actually costs to be the person who puts something on the record — and Brendan is candid that in his own case it has cost very little, which is not true everywhere and has not been true in every era. The second is the objection the Levell…