“A judge ruled not just that the records should have been sealed, he (she) ruled for them to be destroyed.”
And the state complied and destroyed the records that were in their custody to be destroyed.
However, the judge did not order that every copy of that record outside of police custody be destroyed.
In 2009, Arkansas lawmakers revised the state code to provide additional protection for juvenile records. The law very clearly states that “all records are closed and confidential,” except for a handful of narrowly tailored exceptions. And most records are expunged by the time the juvenile turns 21, according to the code.
But the Duggar case never made it into the juvenile court system, or any court system, for that matter. The alleged crimes occurred in 2002 and 2003, but the police investigation did not occur until 2006. By that time, Josh Duggar was already an adult at age 18, so the state code covering the confidentiality of juvenile records would not apply to this case, legal experts have said.
If the Duggars were to pursue legal action, they’d have an uphill battle, experts say. Journalists and advocates for public information consider Arkansas’s open records law to be one of the nation’s best. The Arkansas state attorney general even describes it as one of “the most comprehensive and strongest” public records laws in the United States.
That means that there are very few legal exemptions for public officials to withhold documents. And if officials don’t comply with the law, they can face misdemeanor charges and fines. Just Thursday, for instance, the director of a Little Rock housing authority was found guilty of failing to comply with FOIA.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press provides a comprehensive guide on state-by-state open records laws for disclosing police records. In Arkansas, one of the most common exemptions for the release of law enforcement records concerns those related to ongoing criminal investigations. But that exemption would not be applicable in the Duggar case, as the investigation ended in 2006 after authorities determined the statute of limitations had expired for any possible crimes.
In 1997, Arkansas passed a Victim Rights Law that prohibits the release of a victim’s address or telephone number under FOIA. But since the victims’ names and gender were scrubbed from the police report, there appears to be no violation of that law, attorneys say.