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An ally of Michael M. Bell, the Kenosha father who has been campaigning for a decade for a new look at the police killing of his son 20 years ago, is suing the Wisconsin Department of Administration for records in a dispute with the state Department of Justice and the Wisconsin Crime Victims Rights Board (CVRB).
Russell Beckman filed the open records lawsuit Tuesday in Dane County circuit court in response to the administration department’s denial of billing records from a private law firm that had a contract with the victims rights board.
In the lawsuit, which he filed without a lawyer, Beckman states that he “believes the Department of Administration is attempting to conceal these records because they may contain information that constitute evidence of misconduct and unlawful collusion between high ranking Wisconsin State officials and citizen members of the CVRB.”
Michael M. Bell’s son, Michael E. Bell, was killed in November 2004 by a Kenosha Police Department officer after an altercation in the driveway of the home where the younger Bell lived. A department internal investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of the officers on the scene.
Michael M. Bell subsequently campaigned for a Wisconsin law, enacted in 2014, that requires fatalities at the hands of police to be investigated by another department
Since settling a civil lawsuit with the city of Kenosha arising from the killing, the elder Bell has sought to reopen the investigation into the death of his son. The younger Bell was being physically restrained by police when an officer shot and killed him, eyewitnesses and police reports agree. The police account reported that officer fired the shot after another officer at the scene, who was standing near the 21-year-old, shouted that Bell had grabbed his holstered service handgun.
Citing discrepancies between the official police account of the incident and eyewitness testimony as well as physical evidence at the scene, Michael M. Bell has maintained that his son probably never touched the second officer’s weapon, none of the officers were in danger of being shot by the younger Bell, and that the killing was unnecessary.
The elder Bell has said the second officer may have been sincere in his assumption that his gun had been grabbed. Based on eyewitness accounts, however, he thinks the second officer was not where his son could have grabbed the gun. Bell believes the officer who fired the fatal shot was in a position to know that the second officer was mistaken and did not need to take his son’s life.
Bell’s repeated attempts to persuade authorities to reinvestigate the events of that night have been unsuccessful, including multiple appeals to Attorney General Josh Kaul.
In December 2022, Beckman, a retired Kenosha police detective who has been assisting the elder Bell for more than a decade, filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Crime Victims’ Rights Board on Bell’s behalf.
The complaint charged Kenosha police and city officials had concealed information about Michael E. Bell’s death, and in the process committed “alleged crimes [that] included the felonies of perjury, destruction of public records, misconduct in public office and conspiracy to commit these crimes.”
The complaint also charged that Kaul “and high ranking subordinates” at the state Department of Justice repeatedly ignored attempts by Beckman and Bell to bring their concerns to the attorney general’s attention.
In June 2023, Madison attorney Hal Harlow emailed parties in the case — Beckman, Bell and a DOJ lawyer — that he had been “retained to act as legal counsel to the Wisconsin Crime Victims Rights Board” in the matter.
In November 2023, the CRVB decided it lacked probable cause for the complaint, holding Michael M. Bell didn’t have “victim status” in connection with the complaint’s allegations. “The alleged conduct is against the government and its administration, not against individual persons,” the decision stated.
After that ruling, according to the lawsuit, Beckman “filed a number of public records requests with the CVRB, seeking records that may have evidence supporting his belief that Attorney General Josh Kaul and/or his staff may have colluded with the CVRB to influence their decision to dismiss the complaint.”
The board supplied records that have become part of the appeal that Beckman has filed on Bell’s behalf. The appeal is now before the Wisconsin Appeals Court District IV in Madison after being dismissed in circuit court.
Meanwhile, Beckman filed an open records request with the Department of Administration seeking attorney billing records for the Crime Victims Rights Board in connection with the Bell complaint.
The department issued a blanket denial of Beckman’s request. DOA cited the ongoing litigation over the lawsuit against the board and asserted that “those records and that information would reveal strategy and efforts that would affect the ongoing litigation.” The department also denied a request to reconsider its denial, and a request for a copy of the contract for the outside law firm.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday argues that the denials violate Wisconsin’s open records law. The attorney billing records, the contract and its addendums are not “attorney work product” and are not privileged attorney-client communications, Beckman argues.
Beckman said in an interview Tuesday he wants the billing records and contract because they might shed light on interactions between the DOJ and the Crime Victims Rights Board, which are supposed to operate independently of each other. He said he’s learned other unexpected information in his work with Bell over the years that turned up by perusing attorney billing records.
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