Insider sues Mississippi sheriff's department for refusing to hand over public incident reports

• Insider has been trying to get answers on the deaths of five men in Mississippi who died during confrontations with, or in the custody of sheriff's deputies.
• The Rankin County Sheriff's Department has only turned over public records related to two of them.

Insider filed a lawsuit Monday after a Mississippi sheriff's department repeatedly refused to turn over public records related to a string of men who died last year during confrontations with, or in the custody of, sheriff's deputies.

For the past five months, Insider has been trying to get answers from the Rankin County Sheriff's Department about the deaths over an eight-month period of Damien Cameron, Trevor McKinley, Cory Jackson, Robert Rushton, and Adam Coker. Insider has sought to obtain public records, including incident reports, related to the five men's deaths but has only received incident reports related to two of them.

Insider is now asking the Chancery Court of Rankin County to "order RCSD to produce the public records sought" and to award Insider all costs and expenses — including attorneys' fees — for failing to turn the rest of the reports over.

Rushton and McKinley were shot to death during confrontations with Rankin County sheriff's deputies, while Cameron, Jackson, and Coker died in RCSD custody.

On February 17, Insider requested incident reports, dispatch logs, and other law enforcement records relating to four of the men who died after interactions with Rankin County sheriff deputies. The fifth report was requested separately.

Insider received a response a week later from Jason Dare, an attorney representing the RCSD, spelling out the necessary fees to produce the records.

The payment was delivered on March 2, but out of the four incident reports requested, RCSD only produced an incident report for Corey Jackson's death in custody. Records for Coker, which were requested separately, were also provided.

As for the incident reports requested in connection with Cameron, McKinley, and Rushton's deaths, the RCSD claimed those reports were "exempt from production," according to the lawsuit.

Families of the deceased have a also been met with roadblocks when seeking information about their loved ones.

"I want some answers," Charlene Quarles, Trevor McKinley's grandmother, told Insider for a story published in March. "If it was all upfront and done by the law, why would nobody tell you anything? It's been six months."

"We don't have a toxicology report, we don't have any information whatsoever," Jackie McKinley, his mother, said. "They've released nothing to us. They wouldn't even release his body to us. We weren't able to have a funeral for three weeks."

When Insider wrote the department urging it to reconsider, Dare responded with further explanation as to why the requests were denied.

In a March 10 email to Insider, Dare said the RCSD couldn't turn the reports over until after the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation finished investigating the incidents and/or at the "conclusion of any criminal proceedings."

But as Insider's attorney, Paloma Wu, argued in the lawsuit, there is "no exception recognized" under the Mississippi Public Records Act that allows the RCSD to withhold incident reports.

"RCSD may not withhold the records requested because another agency, MBI, may or may not have an open investigation into how the four men died in custody or at the hands of RCSD. Incident reports are generated for all arrests — and these hallmark public records do not become non-public if an agency is investigating a related crime. Indeed arrests necessarily involve open criminal investigations, and the PRA is clear that incident reports do not cease to be public records on that basis. They must be produced pursuant to a PRA request — regardless of the presence or absence of an open investigation," Wu argued in the lawsuit.

Wu works with the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit, public interest law firm representing Insider in the case. Apart from providing background information on Mississippi law enforcement's history of providing public records and transparency, the Mississippi Center for Justice was not used as a source for the purposes of this story and has had no further influence on the reporting.

Insider reached out to Rankin County Sheriff's Department for comment on the filing and has not heard back.

"Just getting the truth more than anything has just been difficult, and Rankin County Sheriff's department, in my opinion, they feel as though we're not entitled to know the truth," Archie Skiffer, a friend of Damien Cameron's family, told Insider. "What happened happened and just deal with it ... We're not going to get any information from them and they keep passing the buck."