A Hawaii Circuit Court judge ruled Tuesday that the state’s Department of Public Safety must release the names of prisons and prison inmates who died while in state custody. Regularly announce deaths.
Circuit Judge John Tonaki gave an oral verdict last year in a lawsuit filed against the agency by the Honolulu Civil Beat after public safety officials denied all requests to report inmate deaths in 2020 and 2021. I went down.
The Department says the Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 prohibits the “disclosure of personally identifiable health information” contained in reports containing the names of deceased inmates. claimed.
But Tonaki, executive director of the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest, has ordered the agency to release the names and autopsy reports of the deceased prisoners to determine the cause of death in each case. Brian Black said. I challenged Civil Beat’s policy.
The agency runs all of Hawaii’s prisons and prisons and has in the past released the names of deceased inmates at media requests. But starting in late 2020, the agency abruptly changed its policy, declaring that it would not publicly identify inmates who died in custody.
The change was based on advice from the State Attorney General’s Office that blocking the release of information about prisoner deaths would generally prevent the public from knowing how and why individual prisoners died. It was important because it will disappear.
“If society entrusts the care and treatment of individuals to certain government officials, they need to have some accountability when something goes wrong,” Black said Wednesday. It doesn’t matter who the person is, whether it’s a police officer or a prison guard, we’re letting government officials take care of these people, and if something goes wrong, the public will I need to know about it.”
State law requires autopsies to be performed on prisoners who die in custody, and autopsies are by law a public record; It’s nearly impossible to do.
Disclosures this year by inmate families and correctional facility officials have revealed details about some of the internal deaths and helped inform the public about some of the problems with the state’s corrections system. .
For example, the autopsies of Kanikahekiri Quizon and Noah Mamala, who died last year at Halawa Correctional Facility, revealed that they both died from an overdose of a drug called “Spice,” which staff said had been widely used internally. reported to be in use.
As another example, the suicides of six prisoners in Maui Prison over the past five years have highlighted the urgent need to improve mental health services.
The current DPS policy of keeping the names of deceased inmates confidential is inconsistent with long-standing practices in other states, including California, Arizona and Nevada. Each of these states regularly announces prisoner deaths at correctional facilities in their jurisdictions.
According to Black, the 2021 Civil Beat autopsy report request was for the kind of documents that have been classified as public records for decades. He said the agency’s response to preventing HIPAA from disclosing autopsies or the names of deceased inmates was far too broad.
“The mere fact that someone died is not classified information,” Black said. “If it’s public information, just because it’s in the hands of a department shouldn’t mean it’s confidential.”
The question of what information can be released in connection with an inmate’s death was discussed by the Hawaii Correctional System Oversight Board on October 20, and Public Safety Director Max Otani made more information available at the time. said he was ready to do so.
“It was my position to release information when the law allowed it,” he said.
Ohtani said that if the committee wishes to introduce a bill to Congress to address the issue, he is “willing to cooperate on any wording that we deem appropriate.”
Public Security Bureau spokeswoman Toni Schwartz said in a written statement following Mr. Tonaki’s ruling, “The Public Security Bureau will comply with the judge’s orders. It was to amend the statute to make it possible.”
The bureau will refer to the Attorney General’s Office on whether to appeal Tonagi’s order, according to a statement.
