Legal battle intensifies over release of body camera footage from Uvalde school shooting
The debate over the Texas Department of Public Safety releasing body camera video and documents related to the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde continues.
Wednesday, a court of appeals heard oral arguments after the state appealed a lower court ruling to release the material. One judge on the panel noted that the DPS records include more than 6 million pages of documents and hundreds of hours of video.
In June of last year, a state judge ruled DPS had to release all of its records pertaining to the deadly shooting of 21 people at Robb Elementary. The state appealed that ruling leading to further litigation.
On Wednesday, Chief Justice Scott Brister posed the question at hand:
"I'm just wondering, body camera footage - it is what it is," said Brister. "It shows what it shows. It's not going to change... why does that need to be kept secret?"
In total, there are 2.8 terabytes of material that have been requested by CBS News and other media organizations.
"The fact that the footage isn't really going anywhere doesn't really have anything to do with those particular concerns about potential jury bias or witness recollection because if those kinds of things are released to the public they can interfere with public opinion," said Texas Assistant Solicitor General Sara Baumgardner.
Laura Lee Prather, a partner at Haynes Boone representing the media organizations, called the attempt to block the records "an attempt to cloak the entire file in secrecy forever. We're talking about the most significant law enforcement failure in Texas history ... The public interest could not be higher."
"[The media] can make whatever inflammatory allegations about DPS they'd like to make," Baumgardner said. "Texas courts have recognized that the entity in best position to know what would interfere with a prosecution is the actual prosecutor, not a bunch of news outlets."
A final decision was not made Wednesday and the appeals court did not indicate when it might rule on the case. Any decision can be appealed to the state Supreme Court.