“I just killed my two kids. . . . I drowned them. . . . They are 2 and 4. . . . I just shot myself. . . . with a gun. . . . Please hurry.”[1]
That was the dying declaration of 21-year-old Julia Murray on February 16, 2010,[2] preserved for all of posterity on a 911 emergency telephone recording and available to anyone and everyone in Florida—from journalists and police to even voyeurs and perverts—under that state’s open records laws.[3] Murray and one of her three children are gone (the second child survived the drowning attempt), but her words remain. Should the public have a right to hear them?
In 2010, multiple events magnified public focus on the escalating tension between family members’ privacy rights with respect to the death-scene images and dying words of their loved ones, on the one hand, and the public’s right to access those documents, on the other.
