Lanza’s Writings, Journals To Be Released
Key Win In Fight For Sandy Hook Records
The state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that documents and journals belonging to Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza will be released to the public, a key victory in the Hartford Courant’s fiveyear battle to obtain the information.
The Courant requested access to the documents that state police removed from the Yogananda Street home in Newtown where Lanza killed his mother Nancy Lanza before driving to the school and killing 26 people, including 20 first-graders, before killing himself.
In a unanimous decision, the court ordered a lower court judge to reverse himself and deny the state’s appeal of a Freedom of Information Commission decision that ordered the items released.
“Since the day of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, The Courant has worked to advance the understanding of how so heinous a tragedy could happen and we applaud today’s decision as we feel these
documents are necessary for us to tell a complete story in our reporting,” said Andrew Julien, The Courant’s publisher and editor-in-chief. “Understanding what a mass killer was thinking not only paints a clearer picture of the individual, it helps us identify and understand red flags that could be part of a prevention formula for future mass shootings.”
The state attorney general’s office declined to comment Tuesday. The state could ask the Connecticut Supreme Court to reconsider or ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.
The court rejected several arguments the attorney general’s office made to keep the records sealed, including that the documents seized were the property of the judicial department, were the private property of Nancy and Adam Lanza and shouldn’t be considered public documents because they were seized through a search warrant and never used as evidence in a criminal case.
Among the documents to which the newspaper sought access were a spreadsheet that Lanza kept on his computer of other mass killers going back to at least the 1970s, journals that he wrote, and other items removed from his bedroom during a second search of the house in the days following the Dec. 14, 2012, massacre.
The records were described in a state police report released a year after the school shooting. The Courant requested access to the records under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, but police declined to release them.
The newspaper filed a complaint with the Freedom of Information Commission and won, but the state police appealed to Superior Court, where Judge Carl J. Schuman overruled the commission, setting up the Supreme Court battle.
In oral arguments before the court last March, an assistant attorney general representing the state police urged the court to keep the records secret, asking the justices to uphold the ruling of a Superior Court judge who declared the material was private property exempt from the disclosure mandates of Connecticut’s publicrecords laws.
Assistant Attorney General Steven Barry told the justices that state laws governing seized evidence establish strict protocols for handling property taken involuntarily by search warrant, and said the legislature could not have intended the public to have “unfettered access” to the property, even when not used in a criminal action.
In addition to the spreadsheet and booklet, police seized hand-drawn comics, school records and a screenplay featuring a relationship between a 10-year-old boy and a 30-year-old man.
The legal question for the justices turned on whether the state’s searchand- seizure laws supersede the Freedom of Information Act. But there was a practical element as well, with The Courant arguing that release of the records could help the public understand the ruthless attack on the elementary school, and the state police arguing that a ruling in The Courant’s favor could expose financial records or a private diary.
During arguments in the case, several justices challenged Barry’s assertion that the laws covering search warrants were in conflict with the Freedom of Information Act and in his written opinion Justice Raheem L. Mullins said the law was silent on the issue.
“The trial court pointed to nothing in the express terms of the search and seizure statutes that creates confidentiality in the documents or otherwise limits the disclosure, copying, or distribution of the documents,” Mullins wrote. “Indeed, the search and seizure statutes are silent on the issues of confidentiality, copying, or disclosure to the public.”
The court also rejected the argument that the documents were private property and should not be disclosed since they were seized from the Lanza home.
“Even if we agree with the trial court that the search and seizure statutes protect the ownership rights of the people whose property has been seized, we cannot conclude that a statutory scheme requiring that property be returned to its owners creates a duty of confidentiality for those items or otherwise limits public disclosure,” Mullins wrote.
State police declined to release the documents, arguing that statutes covering search warrants treat the material as private property that may be used only for limited law-enforcement purposes. On that basis, the police pointed to a portion of the Freedom of Information Act that makes records subject to disclosure unless “otherwise provided by any federal law or state statute.”
The Freedom of Information Commission rejected that argument, concluding that records may be withheld under that provision only if a competing federal or state law explicitly provides for the confidentiality of the records.
But that analysis was rejected in turn by Schuman, setting the stage for the Supreme Court to resolve the dispute over what exactly the phrase “otherwise provided” means under Connecticut law.