Ga. Supreme Court to review access to cold case files
From Johnny Edwards, SPJ Sunshine Chair for Georgia
An interesting open records
battle is about to go before the Georgia Supreme Court. It involves
the issue of police withholding cold case files by calling the cases “pending
investigations.”
The Athens Banner-Herald
requested access
to police files in the 1992 rape and slaying of 22-year-old Jennifer
Stone, a University of Georgia student found strangled to death
in her apartment. I seem to recall that the only clues police found
were some
of her personal items on sale at an Athens
pawn shop.
Athens’ consolidated city-county government denied the
request, saying it’s an open investigation, that DNA evidence could still
solve the homicide and that’s it’s pending because an officer is
designated to periodically review the files. The newspaper sued. An Athens judge dismissed
the case, but the Georgia Court of Appeals ordered the files made public. The
county appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear it. Oral arguments should
happen early next year.
This is a problem we frequently run into in Georgia. When
homicide investigations hit a brick wall, departments stop working on them.
Governments, however, can keep the files secret in perpetuity by saying there’s
always a chance the case could get solved. Under their argument,
investigative files are never open unless the case has gone to trial and a jury
has rendered a verdict. In some cases, governments will extend this closure
until all appeals are exhausted.
It ends up being a big stall tactic that prevents the public
from finding out what went wrong in a cold case. Sometimes, what went wrong was
that the case was bungled. Keeping files secret prevents the public from looking
deeply into law enforcement’s biggest failures. Personally, I’ve
been fighting this battle over the files in an unsolved homicide from 1978,
which I know through various sources was bungled and will probably never be
solved, but the Georgia Bureau of Investigation won’t turn over the
documents, stating that an agent “periodically reviews” the files.
Johnny Edwards
SPJ Sunshine Chair for Georgia
706-823-3225
Cell: 706-736-1951