As part of Sunshine Week this week, Dave Yost released a list of 414 citations issued to 357 public entities in 2016, most cited for lacking complete policies for public records. The state auditor emphasized that Ohio law requires local governments to develop such policies. More, all elected officials or a designee must receive three hours of training from the state auditor or attorney general’s office during their term.
Yost rightly emphasized that accepting a public paycheck comes with an obligation to get the necessary training. Without the training, public officials often lose sight of what should drive their decisions on releasing information — documents belong to the people, not the officials who generated them.
This year, Sunshine Week, a national event organized to celebrate open government, comes at a particularly crucial time in Ohio. Beyond the hundreds of local governments that need to be more vigilant about public records policies and training, a major fight is brewing over access to coroners’ records, which are being withheld from journalists and the public in several big cases. Unfortunately, two of the cases are local, in Stark and Medina counties.
In Stark County, the coroner’s office is refusing to release records relating to the death of 5-year-old Ashley Zhao. At issue is access by journalists to preliminary autopsy reports. Although the public is barred from such records, state law clearly gives journalists the right to view them.
In response, the Stark County prosecutor is claiming what amounts to a blanket exemption, arguing the records are part of a homicide investigation. Yet state law much more narrowly defines what is confidential, such as information that would identify a confidential informant.
In the Medina County case involving the death of a township trustee, access to a preliminary autopsy report is being blocked by what amounts to a shell game. The report, put together under contract by the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, hasn’t been sent to Medina, but Cuyahoga County says only Medina can release the document.
In a sensational case in Pike County involving the murder of eight family members, the coroner is refusing to release a final autopsy report, widely consider a public record available to all, again claiming a blanket exemption because of an ongoing investigation.
The battles over coroners’ reports follow a disturbing trend toward exemptions to the state’s 1963 open records law, now riddled with some 30 loopholes. Time after time, lawmakers have bowed to pleas for secrecy, covering everything from records on concealed carry permits to how the death penalty is conducted.
While some exemptions appear well-meaning, they often are based more on remote possibilities than hard evidence about the need to withhold public records. In other words, the idea that giving access to coroner’s records might somehow derail a criminal investigation is far outweighed by the right of journalists and members of the public to know the details of violent and mysterious events in their backyards.