Autopsies in family’s slaying cloaked
In ruling that final autopsy reports from a 2016 mass homicide aren’t public records, four Ohio Supreme Court justices have paved the way for governments to operate with ever more secrecy in the future.
Thursday’s 4-3 decision is the latest in a series of rulings that have weakened the state’s once-robust public-records laws and thrown roadblocks before Ohioans’ efforts to hold government accountable.
Records will show that the ruling went against The Dispatch and the Cincinnati Enquirer, which sought the autopsies for eight people, mainly members of the Rhoden family, killed in April 2016 in Pike County. But it is a blow against any Ohioan’s right to know what government is doing.
Because the justices muddied the previously clear understanding that autopsy reports are public records, any county coroner or lawenforcement official or prosecutor in the future who wants to withhold purely factual information about the manner of someone’s death will have a better chance of being allowed to do it.
And autopsy reports aren’t the only public documents likely to be affected by the ruling. Every court decision against transparency encourages the next official to try a new argument against the public’s right to know.
The newspapers’ request should not have been controversial; autopsy reports long have been considered public records in Ohio in practice and, in 2006, the General Assembly amended public-records law to state explicitly that they are.
Another amendment, in 2009, allowed documents to be withheld if they are “confidential law-enforcement investigatory records.” Only law-enforcement officials can produce those, and the law does not classify county coroners as lawenforcement officials. But Thursday’s ruling ignored that, saying that a coroner’s work is “investigative and pertains to law enforcement.”
Further, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor’s majority opinion stated that these particular autopsy reports should be withheld because they have “investigative value” — a concept that is mentioned nowhere in public-records law, and which throws wide open the definition of a “confidential law-enforcement investigatory record.”
Under Ohio law as written, the “investigative value” of a government document has no bearing on whether it is a public record.
In a powerful dissent, Justice Sharon L. Kennedy wrote that, in giving weight to the “investigative value” of the autopsies, the court opened the door to many more records being kept secret.
She continued: “Members of the judicial branch, whose authority is limited to giving effect to the law as written — not rewriting it or legislating from the bench — writing ‘investigative value’ into the statute is beyond our authority.”
The Dispatch has no desire to compromise the investigation of the Pike County killings, which remain unsolved a year and a half later. We do not believe that ethical and responsible reporting of the facts would do so, any more than countless other autopsy reports have in countless other investigations.
Given the lack of progress to date, it’s possible that public knowledge of facts in the Pike County reports could lead to a break in the case. Above all, we hold that transparency is essential to democracy and that Thursday’s ruling, by encouraging government secrecy, hurts all Ohioans.