CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, Va. — Three and a half years after a Chesterfield woman filed a lawsuit against the county, challenging its handling of a public records request, her lawyer has accused the county of destroying many of the records at the very center of the ongoing legal battle.
The case dates back to 2022, when Charlotte Carter filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for incident records involving her arrests including body camera footage, 911 calls, radio recordings and incident reports. Carter's lawyer Joy Ramsingh said none of the charges connected to the arrests resulted in a conviction.
According to court filings, the county gave her a $24,000 cost estimate to review and produce the files. The county argued that fee reflected the volume of Carter's request and the time it would take to fulfill it.
However, Carter thought it was an unreasonable price. She filed her petition in November 2022.
“I think every citizen should take part in accountability with our government and accessing public records. Our tax money is going towards funding them. We should know what is going on within the departments," Carter said in a previous interview with CBS 6 about her lawsuit.
The legal battle, though, has dragged on for years and is now hitting a contentious point in that Ramsingh is asking the court to sanction — or formally penalize — Chesterfield and/or its counsel.
In a motion filed in late March 2026, Ramsingh claimed the county destroyed police radio recordings, which accounted for the bulk of the $24,000 fee Carter's lawsuit aims to dispute. Some of the records were allegedly destroyed even after the FOIA petition was sent to the county, according to the motion.
Despite that, Ramsingh said Chesterfield never informed Carter, her counsel, or the court that the records she sued over no longer existed. She alleged the county continued to litigate the case for more than three years while knowing the files were gone.
Ramsingh said she became aware of the matter after coming across a county policy that stated emergency radio and phone recordings automatically delete after six months. She said when she raised the issue with county attorneys, they indicated, but refrained from expressly confirming, that records Carter sought had been purged.
"Indeed, it is now about one month away from the scheduled trial of this matter, and it appears that the County never intended to inform Carter, Petitioner’s counsel, or the Court of the fact that the records at the heart of this litigation had been destroyed years earlier," the motion stated.
Ramsingh is asking the court to award Carter costs and expenses incurred in the litigation since she spent years fighting for access to records that allegedly don't exist.
But in a response opposing the request for sanctions, Chesterfield Senior Deputy County Attorney Julie Seyfarth argued the motion is legally defective, that Carter's FOIA request was deemed withdrawn after she did not pay the cost estimate, that the radio transmissions never existed as retrievable records, and that Chesterfield did not have an obligation to preserve the files.
In order to fulfill Carter's request, Seyfarth said county staff would have to manually listen to every transmission on every channel during each one-hour window for the incidents in question, identify which transmissions involved the relevant officers, and then compile them into new audio files.
Seyfarth further argued that the motion was just a last-minute attempt to salvage Carter's case after the county filed a request in early March to have the lawsuit thrown out completely.
In that motion, the county argued its cost estimate was not an improper fee estimate and based on a calculation that it would take more than 2,000 hours to produce what Carter wanted. In response, Ramsingh argued the county's cost estimate was the "highest possible amount" the county could charge based on a "faulty formula rather than a good faith search."
A judge is scheduled to hear arguments on the motions on Tuesday.
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