The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.
Utah law SB 242, passed in 2017, put a stop to the work of Reginald Williams. Williams, an inmate in the state prison, was known for filing dozens of Government Records Access and Management Act requests, or GRAMAs, every year. The behind-the-bars gadfly often sought information not about his own case but about the inner workings of the Utah Department of Corrections.
In the late 2000s, Williams used GRAMAs to find evidence that Corrections, the Utah Attorney General’s Office and other state agencies had misused funding from the American Reinvestment Act, passed during the Obama administration, to help states deal with the fallout of the 2009 recession. Through private counsel in 2015, he filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the state over the misuse of stimulus funding.
That suit was working through the legal system when Utah curbed inmates’ ability to file GRAMAs that were not about their own records and limited them to five requests a year.
Williams’ whistleblower lawsuit, however, kept moving along, triggering a federal investigation into the fraud allegations and leading the state of Utah to settle with the federal government for $1.5 million in 2022. Williams could collect a reward based on a percentage of the money recovered by the federal government.
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