Mayor Nagin confirms 2008 e-mails were deleted.

• Position: E-MAIL

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has confirmed that all his 2008 e-mails--sent and received--have been deleted, along with half of his 2008 calendar.

He said the messages were accidentally and permanently deleted because of a lack of storage space on the city's servers. Deleting public documents violates Louisiana law, which requires that e-mails, as public records, must be saved for three years. Deleting them is a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in jail or a $5,000 fine. According to The New Orleans Times-Picayune, state law defines the "injuring of public records" as the "intentional removal, mutilation, destruction, alteration, falsification or concealment of any record, document or other thing filed, or deposited ... in any public office or with any public officer."

Nagin's own office wrote a detailed policy recommendation in May 2008, recommending the city maintain backup tapes from its e-mail server, remove them every three months, and store that data offsite, according to The Times-Picayune. "No effort will be made to remove e-mail from the offsite backup tapes," the memo stated. The document also advised that fiscal and administrative e-mail should be retained for four years, while "general correspondence" need be kept only one year.

None of the recommendations were followed, however, according to statements made by a city attorney during a recent court hearing on a lawsuit filed by WWL-TV. The problem first came to light when the station sought copies of Nagin's...