In her story about Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk going to court to get the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's death report on Jocques Clemmons, The Tennessean's Stacey Barchenger notes something I don’t think many people realize: The TBI isn’t recalcitrantly refusing to release this report — it legally can’t.
Barchenger writes, “Tennessee law says that TBI investigative reports are confidential until a subpoena is issued or a judge orders they should be released.”
That’s confidential forever. FBI files eventually open up, even if the names of the living are redacted from them, but TBI files never do. And, you know, on the one hand, I can almost see this. You’d have to have a person just to deal with the requests for Elvis’ file and James Earl Ray’s.
But if the general public doesn’t have some way to eventually evaluate how the TBI has handled investigations, how can we make informed decisions about what kind of leadership we should vote for? Let me put it this way: What if you analyzed TBI data and discovered that they closed 75 percent of cases under Democratic administrations and 25 percent under Republican administrations?
If you like law and order, you might lean for voting Democratic. But what if you picked a random year to analyze, and you found that in 1973, everyone the TBI investigated was named “John Mullins”? Like, they just spent the year pinning every crime they could on one poor guy?
Or say a convicted killer says, “I didn’t do it, and the TBI knows it.” No media outlet can easily look in the killer’s file to see if there’s any indication as to the truth or falsehood of that statement.
In other words, our current situation leaves the TBI without some very basic metrics the public might use for oversight, and it hampers the TBI’s ability to defend itself from false allegations of misconduct.
Shouldn’t there be some moment — 25, 30, even 50 years out from the time of a file’s creation — when a TBI file becomes open to the public?
State Rep. G.A. Hardaway and Sen. Lee Harris sponsored a bill this spring, which the General Assembly passed, requiring that the TBI’s investigative report on officer-involved shootings become available to the public “after completion of an investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation into an officer-involved shooting death and after the completion of the prosecutorial function by the district attorney general.”
This is a good first step. But it’s just a first step, and we need more.
