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The Nevada Press Association has joined the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in seeking to contest a judge’s ruling that news organizations must refrain from publishing stories about an autopsy from the October massacre in Las Vegas and destroy their copy of the records.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal and Associated Press already have filed an appeal challenging the judge’s gag order as an unconstitutional prior restraint on the First Amendment. Nevada Press and the Reporters Committee on Wednesday filed papers asking to be heard in the case.
The dispute arises from an order last week by District Judge Richard Scotti for the Review-Journal and AP to destroy an autopsy report on the death of a police officer killed in the shooting last fall on the Las Vegas Strip, one of 58 reports that a different judge had decided were public records. The autopsy reports were released to the press after names and other information on the victims had been removed.
The widow of the police officer then filed suit to reverse the release of the report on her husband, arguing that her privacy concerns outweighed the public’s access to the records. Judge Scotti agreed.
In their brief to the Nevada Supreme Court, Nevada Press and the Reporters Committee argue the victim’s privacy couldn’t have been violated because the names and other identifying information already were removed from the reports.
The news organizations “have tremendous sympathy for the (families) and the immense tragedy (the widow), her children, and the city of Las Vegas, have suffered. It is understandable that (she) seeks to shield herself and her family from any further pain that might be caused by reading about her husband’s death in the media. However, in seeking to protect (her) from this pain, the district court has ignored decades of established precedent under the First Amendment, protecting the flow of information to the public, and issued a gag order that is plainly unconstitutional,” wrote Las Vegas attorney Marc Randazza.
Read the brief
One of the key arguments in the press’s brief is that access to public records is a fundamental means to hold government agencies accountable.
“For example, when a Chicago police officer shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, police told the public that McDonald died of a gunshot wound to the chest after he lunged at the officer with a knife,” according to the brief. “The autopsy report, obtained later by a journalist through a public records request, showed that McDonald was shot by police sixteen times, in different areas of the body and from different angles. This information sparked a public debate about the case, and was partly responsible for a federal investigation of the Chicago police department.”
Finally, Nevada Press and the Reporters Committee point to the First Amendment principles that set a high bar for any action by a judge to prohibit newspapers from publishing public information.
“To allow this prior restraint to stand would defy decades of well-established U.S. Supreme Court case law, send a chilling message to the press and the public by calling into question the news media’s ability to report on public records, and provide virtually no protection for the asserted privacy interests at stake, since the media has already reported on the anonymized autopsy report at issue (along with the 57 other such reports),” Randazza wrote in the brief.
Punish the paper?
The argument over autopsy reports is one of two public-records disputes involving press coverage of the Las Vegas massacre.
Earlier this week, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department asked a judge to punish the Review-Journal for publishing the name of a “person of interest” in the shooting — after the man’s name had been mistakenly released in documents.
After the newspaper published Douglas Haig’s name, the Arizona man identified himself to a gaggle of reporters outside his home as “the guy that sold ammunition to Stephen Paddock.” Later that week, Haig was charged with conspiracy to manufacture and sell armor-piercing ammunition without a license, according to the Review-Journal.
“They keep saying over and over in the briefs they want to punish us,” attorney Maggie McLetchie, who represents the newspaper, said of Metro police. “I understand they’re frustrated with how this happened, but they can’t punish the Review-Journal for publishing lawfully obtained, truthful information.”