Kentucky Newspapers Fighting for Release of Unedited Child Abuse Records
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Earlier this week, The Lexington Herald-Leader and the Louisville Courier-Journal filed separate motions in an attempt to get the state’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services to release full case files involving child deaths and near-deaths as a result of abuse or neglect. The motions came following the cabinet’s release of more than 300 pages of heavily edited internal reviews on Monday. The redacted files omitted or censored the names of not only children that were killed or injured, but in some instances, the names of suspects and counties in which the abuses occurred. Wednesday, the Louisville Courier-Journal filed a motion in the Franklin Circuit Court requesting that the Cabinet for Health and Family Services be held in contempt for editing the files. That same day, the Lexington Herald-Leader asked Judge Phillip Shepherd to make the cabinet produced unabridged copies of social worker reviews from 2009 and 2010.