Long after a criminal case is completed and a jury or judge has ruled, the paperwork that helped put a suspect in prison might never be released.

Except for the required daily disclosure of basic information on suspected crimes, traffic crashes and complaints, Indiana law enforcement agencies can label police reports, videos, 911 recordings and other records as “investigatory” and withhold them from public view indefinitely.

Defined simply as “information compiled in the course of the investigation of a crime,” investigatory records can be almost anything.

In a 2009 opinion, former Indiana Public Access Counselor Heather Willis Neal called the investigatory rule “one of the broadest exceptions found” in the Indiana Access to Public Records Act.

The access counselor, who issues opinions on access denials, has concluded that law enforcement agencies for which the rule applies include fire departments with investigative arms.

The city of Fort Wayne has used the exception frequently in high-profile cases.

•In January 2009, various reports were written by Fort Wayne Fire Department investigators and recordings of 911 calls made in the aftermath of a blaze that left three college students dead at an apartment complex on the city’s southwest side.

•Several times between 2005 and 2008, Fort Wayne police were called to a home where a woman claimed her half brother was fathering her children. The man was not charged with incest until 2009, but some of the police reports made in the years before the man’s arrest have yet to be released.

•In December 2007, cameras in Fort Wayne police cruisers captured the death of Jose Lemus-Rodriguez, a 24-year-old man shot multiple times by a rookie police officer after a car chase on the city’s southeast side.

In each case, records have been withheld.

In her 2009 opinion, Neal found Fort Wayne within the law to keep videos depicting Lemus-Rodriguez’s death under wraps. The Journal Gazette, denied the video, had filed the complaint.

Nothing in the law provides that investigatory records apply only to ongoing or open investigations, Neal wrote, and nothing mandates they be released upon the completion of an investigation. Likewise, nothing prohibits their release.

After criticism by The Journal Gazette for withholding records, Mayor Tom Henry penned a guest editorial for the newspaper stating his office’s commitment to openness despite keeping the tapes from the public.

Henry declined to be interviewed for this story.

“We don’t see any reason to rehash that,” city spokesman Michael Joyner said.

Fort Wayne is not alone in withholding documents under the investigatory records provision. The public access counselor Web site lists many denials based on the exception.

“One of the problems with the law is an investigatory record is whatever an agency says it is,” said Gerry Lanosga, treasurer of the Indiana Coalition for Open Government, a non-profit advocacy group that promotes legislative overhaul and constitutional rights of access to public records. Lanosga was an investigative journalist for WTHR-TV Channel 13 in Indianapolis and now teaches at Ball State University.

In Fort Wayne, police reports made during the course of homicide investigations are typically not released. Many police reports dealing with sexual assault, rape and child molestation have also been kept from public view.

“The investigatory exception is set up to protect information collected by law enforcement agencies,” said Stephen A. Key, general counsel for the Hoosier State Press Association.

Some believe the law is far too broad. Tony Fargo, an associate professor at the Indiana University School of Journalism who specializes in media law, said the law was more to protect specific information and not to keep basic information from the public.

“The thing that always distresses me most when I hear this is that the people we hire to uphold the law really seem to have a problem with this one,” he said. “I don’t think (lawmakers’) intent was to make the world safe from auto-accident reports. I think it was so if you have a confidential informant that you didn’t have to blab that all over the world. I don’t think the (investigatory) exemption was designed to put up a barrier to getting routine information.

“The concern you always have is if the law is written too vaguely, it opens the door for arbitrary interpretation,” Fargo said.

Fort Wayne releases some narratives from police reports – the who, what, when and where of an alleged crime – as long as they do not involve a homicide or sex crime.

Not included are lists of witnesses and the names and birth dates of those involved that typically accompany a report.

Summaries of reports involving homicides are typically released, but not the actual reports.

A law enforcement agency “can take a copy of an incident report and they might delete the name of a suspect, but they make the information available to a reporter and satisfy the provision, even though it’s an investigatory record,” Key said.

While other states have laws that open records after an investigation is completed, there’s a reluctance to push for that in Indiana over a concern that agencies will keep an investigation open simply to deny records, Key said.But keeping records sealed can have repercussions with the public.

In the Indianapolis area, an alleged assault on a bus involving players from Carmel High School’s boys basketball team has produced a flurry of news reports. So far, little information has been produced, although police are investigating.

The slow stream – or even lack – of information so far about the alleged assault has many who participated in an Indianapolis Star Internet chatroom questioning whether a cover-up is happening.

Some letters to the editor that came to The Journal Gazette after the Lemus-Rodriguez shooting questioned whether the city had anything to hide.

The investigation was complete, the prosecutor’s office determined there was no criminal wrongdoing, and the city settled a $335,000 lawsuit with Lemus-Rodriguez’s family. Yet the videotapes remain sealed.

jeffwiehe@jg.net

Dan Stockman of The Journal Gazette contributed to this story.