A judge is giving the North Carolina Secretary of State and the NCAA 60 days to resolve a dispute over documents from the NCAA investigation of UNC's football program.
Wake County Superior Court Judge Paul C. Ridgeway declined to rule Monday on a request from Elaine Marshall's office seeking to force the NCAA to turn over documents as the office investigates whether the state's sports agent laws were broken. Instead, Ridgeway said Marshall's office should file its subpoena through the NCAA's home state of Indiana for jurisdictional purposes after an NCAA attorney promised his client would provide requested documents in unredacted form in response to a subpoena there.
If the subpoena isn't served by Indiana officials or the NCAA refuses to comply within 60 days, the matter would return to Ridgeway's courtroom.
Marshall's office seeks several items, including an unredacted copy of the notice of allegations outlining nine violations in the program as well as records of interviews conducted by NCAA staff. Several of those focus on former associate head coach John Blake.
Blake's close friendship with late NFL agent Gary Wichard has been a key part of both the NCAA and secretary of state's probes. The NCAA began its investigation into improper benefits and academic misconduct in June 2010, then Marshall's office followed the next month.
Marshall's petition, filed in October, said the NCAA had refused in July to comply with subpoenas for the records. The two sides then failed to resolve the dispute in a phone conversation in September, with the NCAA saying it would only produce documents in response to a subpoena in Indiana — and only then with confidential information redacted, according to the petition.
But NCAA attorney Walter Dellinger said the NCAA was willing to provide unredacted information during a 45-minute hearing that was largely a jurisdictional debate.
"They are an interstate business in every state of the union, just like Ford or Chevy or IBM," said Blackwell M. Brogden Jr., an attorney with Marshall's office. "When they're conducting business, they're subject to being brought into the courts of the state in which they've acted.
"In this state, they came into North Carolina, they interviewed people in North Carolina, they made transcripts, they took those records and documents and ran back across the state line to Indiana hoping to avoid any kind of accountability."
Dellinger said Marshall's office had revised their requests to focus on agent-related violations and not unrelated academic misconduct issues in the UNC case.
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