Appeals Court Orders New Hearing In Suit Seeking Tennessee DCS Records Of 14-Year-Old’s Starvation Death

Photo: Margie Quin, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, photographed on June 2, 2023. Photo Credit: John Partipilo

By Anita Wadhwani [Tennessee Lookout -CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] –

The Tennessee Court of Appeals has set aside a lower court’s decision that has kept records related to a Shelby County child’s death from being released to the public.

The decision on Thursday means a public records lawsuit, filed by reporter Stacy Jacobson of WREG-TV in Memphis, will return to Davidson County Chancery Court for another review.

The Department of Children’s Services denied Jacobson access to complete case files as she sought to report on what the agency did or not do to protect a 14-year-old boy before he died from starvation in 2020.

Attorneys for DCS argued that state law does not permit members of the public or the media to access full and un-redacted case files while criminal proceedings against family members accused in the teen’s death are ongoing — an argument that Davidson County Chancellor Patricia Head Moskal used as the basis for her order denying Jacobson access to the files.

Moskal’s attorney, Paul McAdoo with Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, argued that a 2014 law required DCS to disclose all records related to a child’s death or near-death investigated by the agency once its own child abuse investigation was closed. In the 14-year-old boy’s case, the DCS investigation has ended.

The Court of Appeals found the lower court did not fully analyze how the 2014 applied to the case and ordered it to be heard again in Chancery Court.