The Court of Appeals held earlier this month in In re Public Records Request to DHHS, 2022-COA-284, ___ N.C. App. ___ (May 3, 2022), that the State had no authority to initiate an action in superior court seeking to prevent the disclosure of documents related to its investigation of the death of John Neville, who died while imprisoned in the Forsyth County Law Enforcement Detention Center. This post will review that decision as well as the rules that govern the disclosure of records related to a criminal investigation. The investigation into John Neville’s death. As reported by the Charlotte Observer, John Neville died December 4, 2019, “three days after prosecutors and a federal lawsuit allege that [five] detention officers and [a jail nurse] ignored his medical distress and had him pinned in a prone restraint in a cell for nearly an hour.” The State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) looked into Neville’s death. Ultimately, the six defendants just mentioned were charged with involuntary manslaughter. The Charlotte Observer reported that in April of this year a Forsyth County grand jury returned a true bill of indictment against the nurse but declined to indict the former detention officers. The public records request. Back in the summer of 2020, the SBI provided its investigative file to the county medical examiner who investigated Neville’s death. Around the same time, reporters submitted a public records request to North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for documents relating to Neville’s death. DHHS informed the Forsyth County [...]
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