Oregon Health & Science University no longer needs to pony up $434,000 in attorney’s fees it had been ordered to pay a national animal rights organization as part of a public records battle over medical research videos, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled.
The appellate court reversed the nearly half million dollars in fees owed to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in a Dec. 24 ruling.
Multnomah County Circuit Judge Andrew Lavin had imposed the attorney’s fees in June 2023 after finding that OHSU had engaged in “undue delay” before turning over a hard-drive thought to contain videos from a controversial 2017 experiment on drunken voles.
The videos showed monogamous male and female voles living in three-chambered plastic cages and evaluated how some of them responded under the influence of alcohol when researchers introduced unknown voles.
Oregon Court of Appeals Judge Anna Joyce wrote in the decision that Oregon lawmakers never intended to allow courts to charge attorney’s fees to public agencies for overlong delays in fulfilling public records requests.
The 2019 law does, however, authorize a $200 fine. Lavin imposed it twice.
OHSU didn’t respond to a request for comment. PETA’s general counsel, Asher Smith, noted that the ruling focused on a narrow legal question and said the organization was considering an appeal.
“OHSU violated the law by unduly delaying its production of videos of its torturous, pornographic drunken vole experiments,” Smith said in a statement.
The testing determined that alcohol can impair bonding in drunken male voles, but doesn’t impact aggression levels, according to OHSU. The researchers published their findings in the journal “Frontiers in Psychiatry” in November 2017. They believed they had deleted the videos following publication.
PETA began seeking records from the study in January 2018 and eventually sued in 2020.
As part of the litigation, an OHSU forensic analyst searched and came up empty for the videos. The researchers’ hard-drive was eventually turned over to PETA in September 2021. PETA’s analyst found that most of the videos had been on a desktop folder the entire time.
Joyce, the appeals court judge, has sent the lawsuit back to Lavin’s courtroom. Attorney’s fees could be imposed again if the circuit judge determines OHSU violated the pre-trial process where both sides exchange evidence, known as discovery.
