Under Ohio law, journalists clearly are entitled to view preliminary autopsy reports. But that’s not what is happening in the case of Bryon Macron, the Lafayette Township trustee whose body was found floating in Chippewa Lake last month. The public’s right to know more details about what happened to Macron, whose nearby office was bloody and in disarray and whose car also contained blood, is being blocked by what amounts to a shell game played by the Medina County Prosecutor’s Office and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office.
As reported Saturday by Nick Glunt and Rick Armon, Beacon Journal staff writers, the prosecutor’s office in Medina County says Dr. Lisa Deranek, the county coroner, cannot comply with a public records request because she has received only an oral report from the Cuyahoga medical examiner. The medical examiner is under contract to perform autopsies for the smaller county. Meanwhile, the medical examiner’s office says it won’t release results because they belong to another county.
This outrageous lack of compliance has slammed a lid on further information about the mysterious death of Macron, which has been the subject of wide interest. If Deranek won’t formally request the preliminary autopsy report, which the prosecutor’s office says she has no obligation to do, then the Cuyahoga medical examiner promptly should provide one.
The trouble is, allowing such conduct to persist opens the door to further abuses, eroding the intent of the state’s public records law. The underlying logic is clear: The true owners of government records are members of the public, who pay to produce them and in whose name the information is gathered.
Another battle is looming over a final autopsy report. In a case involving eight family members slaughtered in Pike County, Mike DeWine, the state attorney general, is withholding all but a heavily edited version, arguing the release of the information would harm the investigation. The Cincinnati Enquirer and the Columbus Dispatch have taken the matter to the Ohio Supreme Court.
What the attorney general overlooks is that the state’s public records laws must be construed broadly. No one can know for sure that release of the autopsy report in the Pike County case would damage the investigation. Actually, the opposite might well occur, the information triggering new leads. If the family of the victims deserves answers, so do members of the public, who also have been affected by the violence.
Recent cases about the release of police videos have been resolved by the Ohio Supreme Court to allow narrow exemptions based on the argument the records were part of a confidential investigation. The same principle must apply to autopsy records, with doubts resolved in favor of the public’s right to see the information.