HARTFORD – A Superior Court judge has ruled that video footage showing the death of J’Allen Jones inside the Garner Correctional Institution must be made public. The footage, showing the moments before and after Mr. Jones’s death, was filed in court by the correctional officers his family says killed him.
“What’s done in our names behind bars is ours to see,” said Dan Barrett, legal director of the ACLU Foundation of Connecticut. “This video is the sole visual record of how Mr. Jones died when the Department of Correction should have been taking care of him. The court is absolutely correct to affirm that documents filed by the government need to be seen by the public so that we the people may evaluate our government institutions.”
The Superior Court’s ruling rejected the Attorney General’s efforts to keep the footage secret, ordering the office to produce a version of the video for public release with limited redactions to account for Mr. Jones’s privacy, and to blur out the door numbers and other minor items the Attorney General claimed would harm prison operations.
“Both the Attorney General’s office and the Department of Correction have fought hard to keep this video hidden from the people of Connecticut,” Barrett continued. “But transparency is not optional when a person is harmed behind prison walls. The public — and especially lawmakers who oversee this system — have a right to see what happened here.”
The ACLU of Connecticut remains committed to ensuring transparency and accountability from all branches of government, especially when people’s liberty and lives are in its hands.
More about this case is available here.
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