Bill Rankin reports:
In 1990, five families lost their children, all college students in Gainesville, Fla., to a serial killer who grotesquely mutilated his victims.
In 1994 a new outrage confronted those same families: Florida media outlets filed for access, under the state’s public disclosure law, to crime-scene photos that were beyond horrific. The families hired lawyers, arguing that the public’s right to know did not exceed the families’ right to privacy.
The judge’s resolution of that long-ago case seemed to find a middle ground where none was apparent.
Now, 16 years later, another family faces a remarkably similar heartache: Using the Georgia Open Records Act, a Hustler magazine writer recently requested crime-scene photos of Meredith Emerson, the Buford hiker who was stripped naked and decapitated in the North Georgia woods in 2008.
Read more in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.