The Broward County School Board in South Florida is asking a judge to hold the SunSentinel newspaper and two reporters in contempt of court for publishing a report about accused Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass murderer Nikolas Cruz.
The report detailed Cruz’s years within the school system, the newspaper said. School board officials claim the paper intentionally published information even though it was aware a judge had ordered it redacted.
The report, with nearly two-thirds of its content blacked out, was ordered released on Friday. Reporters Paula McMahon and Brittany Wallman, acting on a tip, discovered that anyone could copy and paste the blacked-out report into a Word document, making all the text visible.
“They opted to report, publicly, information that this court had ordered to be redacted despite agreeing, on the record, that this information was protected by both Florida and federal law,” the SunSentinel quoted the school board court pleading.
Julie Anderson, the paper’s editor in chief, said events surrounding the Feb. 14th mass shooting are of “the utmost importance to our community.”
Cruz faces the death penalty if convicted of the attack that left 17 people dead and 17 others wounded.
The newspaper said the redactions had removed details of Cruz’s history in the school system and specifics about mistakes made by school system officials in dealing with him.
“The problem is the School Board’s problem and not the SunSentinel’s,” said lawyer Tom Julin, who is not involved in the case. “The SunSentinel is entitled to publish the information that it lawfully obtained even if that information should have been redacted from the document that was released.”
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