Opinion ID: 8704092
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Law Enforcement Records

Text: Exemption 7 protects from disclosure “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes,” 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7), but only to the extent that disclosure of such information would cause an enumerated harm, see Fed. Bureau of Investigation v. Abramson, 456 U.S. 615, 622, 102 S.Ct. 2054, 72 L.Ed.2d 376 (1982). “To show that the disputed documents were compiled for law enforcement purposes, the [agency] need only establish a rational nexus between the investigation and one of the agency’s law enforcement duties and a connection between an individual or incident and a possible security risk or violation of federal law.” Blackwell v. Fed. Bureau of Investigation, 646 F.3d 37, 40 (D.C.Cir.2011) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). The FBI’s declarant describes plaintiffs criminal history as follows: In the mid-1990s, while serving a 260-month sentence in the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania federal prison on a 1992 federal drug conviction, plaintiff formed the White Order of Thule, a white supremacist organization. On November 7, 1996[,] plaintiff and another inmate brutally stabbed to death a third inmate, Randall Scott Anderson. Anderson, who was white, had been serving a sentence for the racially-motivated bombing of a roller-skating rink and for defacing a synagogue. Anderson apologized to the Court and while in prison, and a few days before his murder, converted to Islam. Three days later, a second Lewisburg inmate, Perry York, was murdered — allegedly in retaliation for the Anderson murder. Hardy Decl. ¶ 15. The FBI investigated both murders, and its “Philadelphia Field Office opened the Anderson investigation case under file number 90A-PH-80620.” Id.; see id. ¶ 31. The documents plaintiff requested (FD-302s) were “contained in investigative main file 90A-PH-80620 [and] were generated pursuant to the law enforcement duties of the FBI” in conducting the investigation of “plaintiff for a murder in a federal prison in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1111 and 1112.” Id. ¶ 31; see id. ¶ 22. Plaintiff objects to the declarant’s “allegation that [he] is a ‘white supremacist,’ ” PL’s Opp’n at 1, but he does not challenge the FBI’s representation that the records at issue were compiled for law enforcement purposes, see generally id. The Court concludes that the records responsive to plaintiffs FOIA request are law enforcement records within the scope of Exemption 7.