Sen. Danny Britt said the provision to keep autopsy reports secret had been removed from House Bill 250, but it might come back up again. (File photo)
Republican senators have dropped immediate plans to prevent the public and family members from seeing autopsy reports that are connected to criminal cases.
Last month, Sen. Danny Britt, a Robeson County Republican, presented a proposal to keep secret from the public autopsy reports in criminal cases until those cases were resolved.
Neither family members of the deceased nor the public would have been able to see autopsy reports or photos, or listen to recordings. District attorneys would have been able to describe the reports to family members.
By Tuesday, the provision to keep autopsy reports secret had been removed from the bill, but Britt said might come back up.
“It’s always possible,” he told reporters. “Maybe not this session.”
Britt told reporters that the proposal had been changed to allow family members access to the autopsy reports before legislators decided to drop the whole thing. Britt said he did not want the provision to be a roadblock to passage when the bill (which includes other provisions related to criminal justice) goes back to the House for a vote.
Under current law, autopsy reports are public records. The public can inspect autopsy photos and listen to recordings, but they cannot be copied.
Legislators have been chipping away at the public’s right to see government documents.
Last year, Republicans exempted legislators from the state’s public records law, cloaking their own actions from public view despite opposition from open government advocates and Democrats. Republicans slipped that secrecy provision into the state budget.
In 2020, the legislature passed a bill that would have kept death investigation records in the medical examiner’s possession secret. After widespread criticism, Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed it.
To justify keeping autopsy reports secret, Britt said last month that the public knowledge of autopsy details tainted jury pools, though he could not identify any cases where that had happened.
Media lawyers know of no case where journalists reporting on autopsy findings tainted a jury pool, Phil Lucey, executive director of the NC Press Association, said in an interview last week.
Access to autopsy reports is essential to the public’s right to know, he said.
“All the watchdog journalism we do is the only way we can hold medical examiners and prosecutors accountable,” Lucey said. “There are countless cases where North Carolina journalists have used medical reports to uncover wrongdoing and misconduct to inform the public what’s happening.” [NC Newsline is a member of the NC Press Association.]
The NC Association of Broadcasters also opposed the provision.
“NCAB believes that steps taken to chip away at that baseline, well-founded, longstanding policy harm North Carolinians,” the NCAB told Britt in a May 24 letter. “The public, including the news media, requires access to public records in order to hold the government, including elected officials like District Attorneys and also any public agencies and their employees such as medical examiners and law enforcement officials, accountable and to ensure that the public is well-informed about matters like public health, safety, and crime.”
Britt told reporters he’d only heard media organizations objecting to the provision.
But advocacy groups focused on law enforcement accountability were also opposed.
Marcus Bass, executive director of Advance North Carolina, criticized the provision in an interview last week, saying it was counter to the need for transparency in cases of public deaths.
“Lawmakers in North Carolina over the last decade or so have introduced some of the most regressive legislation,” Bass said. “Our government is supposed to be an expansive body.”
Reporter Ahmed Jallow contributed to this report.
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