By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director

Starting Jan. 1, journalists and the public no longer will have access to most autopsy reports on the deaths of children in Colorado but limited information from those reports will be available.

House Bill 24-1244, signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis last May, declares that an autopsy report prepared in connection with the death of a minor “is not a public record” as defined in the Colorado Open Records Act.

Until this statutory change, all coroners’ autopsy reports were explicitly excluded from CORA’s disclosure exemption for medical records. Case law required that an autopsy report on a homicide victim of any age could be withheld from a requester only under a court procedure specified in CORA for denying access based on a “substantial injury to the public interest” standard.

While those disclosure rules still apply to autopsy reports on adult deaths, bill proponents such as Courtenay Whitelaw persuaded lawmakers that confidentiality is needed for minors’ autopsy reports to protect the privacy of grieving families of victims.

“The release of Riley’s autopsy and the information shared by news and social media has forever negatively impacted my life, my family and Riley’s friends,” Whitelaw testified in legislative hearings. Her 17-year-old daughter Riley was murdered at a Colorado Springs Walgreens in 2022.

Also in those hearings, journalists and child-protection advocates pointed out the public-interest benefits of keeping all autopsy reports open, as they have been for many years.

“When a child dies as a victim of a crime or under suspicious circumstances, that child cannot speak for him or herself — that child has no voice,” Kelly Garcia-Brauch, a former caseworker and child-welfare supervisor, told lawmakers. “In most cases, it is the autopsy report that becomes the child’s voice.”

The new confidentiality statute creates an exception for autopsy reports on minors who die in the custody or under the supervision of a state or local government entity, including a law enforcement agency or a detention center, or while the minor is in foster care or in a public school. A coroner must provide a copy of the report to the public in those cases, if it’s requested.  

In other deaths of people under 18, a coroner must release a summary report containing the following information: 1) cause of death; 2) time, place and manner of death; 3) age, gender and race or ethnicity of the deceased minor; and 4) name of the deceased minor.

The coroner must release the summary report within three business days after receiving a written request or three business days after receiving the summary report information, whichever is later. If the information is incomplete when released, the coroner “shall disclose that any missing information remains under investigation or is otherwise unknown.”

Any person may petition a district court to allow access to an autopsy report on the death of a minor. The court must grant access upon finding that: 1) public disclosure of the report “substantially outweighs any harm to the privacy interests of the deceased and the members of the family of the deceased” and 2) the information sought is not otherwise publicly available.

Follow the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition on X (formerly Twitter) @CoFOIC. Like CFOIC’s Facebook page. Do you appreciate the information and resources provided by CFOIC? Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.