Missouri Press Association
Serving Missouri Newspapers Since 1867
It’s official. The Cole County Circuit Court decision that invalidated the court redaction statute will stand. The Missouri Attorney General’s office informed the plaintiffs in Gross v. State of Missouri, 24AC-CC04658, pending in Cole County, that it would not appeal the trial court’s decision to invalidate a law mandating blanket redaction of witness names in court records.
If you encounter an issue with redacted witness names, you can now confidently state that witness redactions requirements in Section 509.520.1 (4) and (5) have been declared unconstitutional.
With respect to court records, it is time to turn to another long-simmering issue: Complete closure of court proceedings and records. I know from personal experience that entire case files can be closed if the litigants are in agreement and the court finds good cause. Good cause can mean different things to different judges, and often it is easy to find some reason that strikes a judge as “good cause.” Proceedings, records and entire case files can disappear from CaseNet.
Next month I plan to continue MPA’s push for a new court rule that would require notice and a hearing and a finding of compelling circumstances. Under this new rule, “compelling circumstances” would not include embarrassing matters or the “litigants’ desire for confidentiality.”
If your paper has recently encountered in its newsgathering any cases of a closed hearing, record or entire file, please send me a note. I would like to provide fresh examples to the Missouri Press-Bar Commission. As the Missouri Supreme Court has said, ““[J]ustice is best served when it is done within full view of those to whom all courts are ultimately responsible: the public.” Pulitzer Publ’g. Co. v. Transit Cas. Co., 43 S.W.3d 293, 301 (Mo. 2001).
***
Last month the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the First Amendment rights of a publisher to send materials to jail inmates. Human Rights Defense Center v. Baxter County, Arkansas, 23-3586 (8th Cir. 2025). The plaintiff in the case was the Human Rights Defense Center, an organization that publishes books and magazines regarding the rights of prisoners and seeks to distribute the materials directly to prisoners. The defendant was an Arkansas county jail that had rejected the publications because they violated the jail’s “postcards only” policy for accepting mail to inmates.
The Eighth Circuit held that this policy amounted to a blanket ban on HRDC’s publications, and therefore violated the publisher’s First Amendment rights. The Court emphasized that had the distribution of HRDC materials in the jail imposed higher costs, or had the jail offered inmates meaningful alternatives to read the material, such as kiosks or tablets, it might have reached a different conclusion.
While the case concerned an Arkansas jail, the Eighth Circuit’s rulings serve as precedent in Missouri federal courts.
***
Finally, a conceptual reminder about Missouri Sunshine requests – the law applies to records that exist. In early March, a Missouri Court of Appeals decision, Pride v. Boone County Prosecutor’s Office, No. WD86900 (Mo.App.W.D. 2025), addressed the plaintiff’s Sunshine Request to the prosecutor’s office’s Sunshine Law compliance policy.
When the prosecutor’s office provided its policy, the plaintiff followed up, asking for an earlier policy that apparently did not exist. The Court of Appeals held that without evidence that an earlier policy actually existed, the Sunshine Law could not be used to compel one, or the creation of one.
