A judicial hearing officer has reversed the Joint Commission on Public Ethics and held that the New York Civil Liberties Union and three other advocacy groups do not have to reveal their financial backers because doing so could put their supporters at risk.
In four separate decisions, the hearing officer, George Pratt, a former judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, said the JCOPE majority opinion was “clearly erroneous” and held that each of the groups had provided sufficient evidence to warrant an exemption from an ethics rule requiring organizations to disclose their funding sources.
