An appeals court has ruled the public cannot be excluded from a courtroom when a judge is considering whether a sex offender should be committed indefinitely after his prison sentence has expired. Judge Jack Tuter gave NBC 6 permission to bring a camera into the courtroom.
But the attorney for Corey Lake, a sexually violent sexual predator whose 13-year prison sentence expired in 2012, objected. Assistant public defender Rob Jakovich argued details of confidential treatment records would be exposed in open court, unless the public was barred. …
Because ___ was seeking to prove he deserves to be released from the civil commitment center for sexually violent predators, he “does not have the same expectation of privacy of an ordinary citizen in his medical records,” the court found, adding “___ ‘s limited privacy interest in the treatment record is dwarfed by the strong presumption of openness in court proceedings.” Full Article
But doesn’t this directly violate Federal HIPPA laws? You can’t go onto break another law in the process of saying it’s okay to release medical records by way of court hearings.
Some day this ruling will come back to bite them on the ass. Makes me also think these Judges are Elected.