Pennsylvania newspapers fight to access wrongful-death settlements

Update: On Oct. 18, 2024, the district court granted the Bucks County Courier Times’ motion to intervene and ordered the unsealing of the settlement agreement in Lopez v. Bucks County.

With free legal support from attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, Pennsylvania newspapers are uncovering wrongful-death settlements involving a private health care provider that receives millions of taxpayer dollars each year to service county prisons.

In just the past couple of years, the York Daily Record and Bucks County Courier Times have successfully challenged the sealing of three settlements reached between the estates of people who have died in local prisons and PrimeCare Medical, a private contractor that has faced allegations of providing inadequate medical care to inmates. And their effort to chip away at the secrecy concealing wrongful-death settlements isn’t finished. 

Earlier this month, the Courier Times — represented by Reporters Committee Local Legal Initiative Attorney Paula Knudsen Burke and Heather E. Murray of the First Amendment Clinic — filed a motion to intervene and unseal yet another PrimeCare settlement in Bucks County. 

The Courier Times hopes this latest effort will prove as successful as its earlier attempts to shine a spotlight on these wrongful-death settlements. The previously unsealed settlement agreements revealed that PrimeCare has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the families of inmates who have died in custody. 

The Courier Times and York Daily Record have been forced to go to court to seek the unsealing of the settlement agreements because PrimeCare has failed to respond to the newspapers’ requests to voluntarily release the records. 

Jo Ciavaglia, an investigative and enterprise reporter for the Courier Times, said her newspaper employs just five reporters who cover a community of over 600,000 people. Without free legal support from attorneys at the Reporters Committee and the First Amendment Clinic, she said these settlement records “would never see the light of day.” 

“[PrimeCare] wants to fight these things out in court,” Ciavaglia said, “and they’re counting on small newspapers like mine not being able to do it.” 

PrimeCare did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Using a previously unsealed settlement, Ciavaglia has reported that PrimeCare paid $1 million to settle a lawsuit with the family of a Bucks County inmate who died in custody. The lawsuit alleged that the inmate did not receive adequate medical care while experiencing opioid withdrawals.

Burke said efforts to unseal court records not only combat the pervasive culture of secrecy surrounding court records across Pennsylvania, but also educate judges and lawyers about the public’s right of access to court filings.

“A bedrock of what we do as media lawyers is to ensure that the courthouse doors are open,” she said. “There couldn’t be anything more basic than that. These cases, I think, are a great opportunity to make a big impact.”

Murray said she hopes these efforts encourage more transparency in future court filings.

“We hope going forward that any future settlement agreements are publicly filed on the docket to aid the Bucks County Courier Times and other news outlets in their important reporting on allegations of inadequate medical care at Pennsylvania prisons,” Murray said.

Ciavaglia said she’s grateful for the help of Burke and Murray in making this reporting possible.

“I don’t think the public and I don’t even know if the legal community even really understands how important they are, and how important this service is to the preservation of American democracy,” Ciavaglia said.

The Reporters Committee regularly files friend-of-the-court briefs and its attorneys represent journalists and news organizations pro bono in court cases that involve First Amendment freedoms, the newsgathering rights of journalists and access to public information. Stay up-to-date on our work by signing up for our monthly newsletter and following us on Twitter or Instagram.