Starting Jan. 1, journalists and the public no longer will have access to most autopsy reports on the deaths of children in Colorado but limited information from those reports will be available.

House Bill 24-1244, signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis last May, declares that an autopsy report prepared in connection with the death of a minor “is not a public record” as defined in the Colorado Open Records Act.

Until this statutory change, all coroners’ autopsy reports were explicitly excluded from CORA’s disclosure exemption for medical records. Case law required that an autopsy report on a homicide victim of any age could be withheld from a requester only under a court procedure specified in CORA for denying access based on a “substantial injury to the public interest” standard.

While those disclosure rules still apply to autopsy reports on adult deaths, bill proponents such as Courtenay Whitelaw persuaded lawmakers that confidentiality is needed for minors’ autopsy reports to protect the privacy of grieving families of victims.

“The release of Riley’s autopsy and the information shared by news and social media has forever negatively impacted my life, my family and Riley’s friends,” Whitelaw testified in legislative hearings. Her 17-year-old daughter Riley was murdered at a Colorado Springs Walgreens in 2022.