Autopsy ruling overturned

State high court tells judge to vacate order favoring Oct. 1 widow

District Judge Richard Scotti violated the First Amendment when he barred the Las Vegas Review-journal from reporting on the redacted autopsy report of an Oct. 1 shooting victim, a three-justice panel of the Nevada Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

“While we are deeply sympathetic to the decedent’s family’s privacy concerns, the First Amendment does not permit a court to enjoin the press from reporting on a redacted autopsy report already in the public domain,” the opinion states.

The 11-page opinion, authored by Justice Kristina Pickering, comes after the Review-journal filed an emergency petition challenging Scotti’s Feb. 9 ruling, which pertained to the autopsy report of off-duty Las Vegas police officer Charleston Hartfield, one of the 58 people killed at the Route 91 Harvest festival shooting. HOPE AND HEALING

reviewjournal.com/lvshooting

Justices Mark Gibbons and James Hardesty concurred with the opinion.

“We’re grateful the Nevada Supreme Court issued such a strong defense of the First Amendment and press freedoms,” Review-journal Managing Editor Glenn Cook said. “The quick action of the justices reflects the awfulness of Judge Scotti’s decision. His ruling was an abomination.”

In his decision, Scotti sided with widow Veronica Hartfield’s privacy concerns and ordered the Review-journal and The Associated Press to either return

AUTOPSIES

or destroy any copies of Hartfield’s autopsy report.

“While nobody wants a grieving widow to be in pain, we can’t hide the truth about horrific events like 1 October, including the horrific damage that the shooter caused with the weapons he had access to,” Review-journal attorney Maggie Mcletchie said. “There is a national debate about guns right now, and what guns do to the human body is a necessary part of that debate.”

Hartfield’s report was one of 58 that a different judge ordered the Clark County coroner’s office to release in the wake of another lawsuit, which argued that the autopsies of the shooting victims should be public. That judge also ordered the coroner’s office to release the gunman’s autopsy report.

In the Supreme Court opinion, the justices assumed that Hartfield’s family “had a protectable privacy interest in preventing disclosure of Mr. Hartfield’s autopsy report.”

“Even making this assumption, the fact remains that the Review-journal

obtained the redacted autopsy reports from the Coroner before the Hartfield Parties sued,” the decision continues.

Aside from privacy rights, the widow’s attorney argued that she and other victim families should have been notified about the original lawsuit and the possible release of victim autopsies.