South Carolina

The South Carolina Supreme Court reversed a conviction of a street preacher arrested for making anti-gay comments on a sidewalk in downtown Greenville. The preacher was arrested for allegedly violating a city ordinance prohibiting molesting or disturbing others.

The court struck down a subsection of the city ordinance, ruling it unconstitutionally vague, and upheld that Joseph Bane had been wrongly convicted without sufficient evidence.

A media investigation led to three South Carolina cities and towns posting court data online, The (Charleston) Post and Courier reported.

The investigation found that three of the region's largest municipalities, which handle more than 100,000 cases a year, were not posting data on their Web sites. The investigation arose when a newspaper filed an open records request for court data dating back to Jan. 2007 and all three jurisdictions responded with incomplete information.

A South Carolina newspaper alerted an anonymous online commenter that he or she has until Oct. 2 to respond to a Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce subpoena or the newspaper will hand over the commenter’s identity.

The North Myrtle Beach, S.C. city council approved a new policy last week ramping up the charges for public records, in a bid to keep citizens from requesting information "just to have it," the Palmetto Scoop reports.

A Myrtle Beach, S.C. blogger lost a $1.8 million libel judgment in January, The Sun News reports, but a pending appeal and questions about possible procedural glitches in the lawsuit mean the case is not over yet.

South Carolina news groups are speaking out against a local sheriff's office that is refusing to release crime information after business hours, according to The Associated Press.

A new law that recently passed in South Carolina exempts names of concealed weapons permit holders from the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

The bill, signed into law on April 16, bars the public from knowing the names of the more than 60,000 permit holders in the state. Access is limited to law enforcement officials or through a court order only.

South Carolina lawmakers are considering legislation, HB 4243, which would keep the list of state gun permit holders a secret. 

Advocates of the bill argue that the public list might reveal the addresses of victims of abuse or lead criminals to the whereabouts of guns. Critics, however, contend that the information should be available to the public with exclusions for extenuating circumstances.