Judge to unseal Idaho prison report

BOISE – A federal judge on Thursday set a deadline for unsealing an expert’s report on medical care for inmates at an Idaho correctional facility, saying opposing lawyers for the state and prisoners have one week to agree on a statement to accompany the findings.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill appointed the expert to create the report as part of his effort to bring a decades-old lawsuit between the state and inmates at the Idaho State Correctional Institution to a close. Correctional health care expert Dr. Marc Stern filed the report under seal last month.

Attorneys for the state argued that the report should remain sealed until both sides have a chance to contest it, because otherwise, they said, the public could wrongly assume Stern’s findings amounted to a court order.

But during a hearing Thursday, Winmill said the public’s right to know outweighed the state’s concern. He gave both sides one week to agree on wording for a stamp to put on each page of the report stating that it isn’t the court’s official ruling and said after that it would be unsealed.

Though still under seal, it’s clear the report isn’t flattering to the state. Deputy Idaho Attorneys General Mark Kubinski and Colleen Zahn told the court it contained inflammatory statements that if released would be likely to cause an “unjustified public scandal.”

Zahn told Winmill that the state needed a chance to “provide information that shows the conclusions in that report are very inaccurate.”

The lawsuit began in the early 1980s when so many inmates from the Idaho State Correctional Institution began filing lawsuits that the cases threatened to clog Idaho’s federal dockets. The judge presiding over the lawsuits at that time combined them all into one class-action lawsuit.