Kansans’ right to know about criminal complaints at stake in Linn County case over sealed records

Denied access to criminal records in Kansas boy’s death sparks First Amendment lawsuit

The state defends this practice by claiming that sealing criminal complaints in cases where an arrest warrant has not yet been served promotes public safety. But that rationale falls particularly flat in a Linn County District Court criminal case filed last year in connection with the death of a 13-year-old boy.

That case, which names Linn County resident Damon Leonard as the defendant, has been sealed for months even though Leonard has been in custody since law enforcement issued press releases about the charges in December, he was convicted of a related felony in Missouri and given a four-year prison sentence there in May, and the Kansas attorney general’s office announced murder charges against him in June.

Yet the case has remained sealed, presumably either because the arrest warrant has not been served or because proof of such service has not been filed with the court. Making matters worse, the same state law authorizing the seal also requires court clerks to deny the case’s very existence.

The local newspaper of record, the Linn County News, filed a civil lawsuit to resolve this legal limbo, arguing that sealing the case against Leonard violates the paper’s First Amendment right of public access to the complaint. The News’ right of access is based largely on the fact that in the United States, there is a “historic tradition of public access to the charging document in a criminal case.” Rulings on the News’s motion to temporarily void the statute and policy, as well as the state’s motion to dismiss, are pending.

Remarkably, the state’s central defense is that the News has no right to the complaint because the state claims the “historic tradition” of public access to court records does not exist in Kansas.

In support, the state revealed in its filings that when the state’s court system first adopted an electronic case management system in the early 2000s, “criminal cases filed in the district courts in which an arrest warrant was issued or applied for were sealed” in their entirety “until the arrest warrant was executed (or the application for the warrant was denied).”

The KPA’s members, and I daresay the public at large, were unaware of this policy to keep criminal cases secret.

The News’ lawsuit has revealed that the policy went unchecked until 2019, when the Kansas Supreme Court adopted a new case management system and implemented new court rules expressly establishing that criminal cases were not to be automatically sealed. The state even sent an email to attorneys licensed to practice law in the state in 2024 admitting that the rules had to change “due to our evolving understanding of the legal propriety of keeping cases presumptively sealed without a particularized rationale for sealing them.”

Still, the officials who are defendants in the News’s case claim that denying public access — not only to criminal complaints but also to the entire criminal case file — is justifiable because the Legislature’s 2025 statute merely restored the state’s authority to categorically seal criminal cases. In other words, the state argues that because criminal cases were routinely sealed in the past, the challenged law is constitutional and the News’s case should be dismissed.

But as the News put it in its filings, a policy authorizing the seal of court records for the better part of 20 years is “irrelevant to the inescapable legal conclusion that adult criminal complaints in courts throughout this country are among the types of court records that are historically and traditionally open.”

Moreover, a state law cannot trump the First Amendment, particularly if its existence is predicated on restoring a policy that, itself, was unconstitutional. As explained by the News in its case, “it is foundational to our democracy that constitutional rights cannot be legislatively abdicated.”

Still, unless and until the challenged statute is struck down, criminal cases in Kansas will continue to be automatically sealed.  But for now, the News’s lawsuit has shown that the state’s court administrators, many of them lawyers, appear to struggle with accepting the existence, let alone the necessity, of constitutional guardrails for handling court records.

In a democracy, the public has every reason to expect better from its courts.

Emily Bradbury is the executive director of the Kansas Press Association and Kansas Newspaper Foundation. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.