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| Amy Archer Gilligan's murder trial was headline news in 1919. Photo: The Hartford Courant Archive. |
In 1919, Amy
Archer Gilligan was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her husband
and the resident of a nursing home where she worked. She is suspected of
killing at least three other people, and may even have killed more.
She was the inspiration for
a 1941 play called Arsenic and Old Lace,
and for the 1944 film of the same name, starring Cary Grant. She died in
1962, at the age of 93, having spent the intervening years in a state
psychiatric hospital.
Gilligan has long been the
subject of public interest, and Connecticut journalist Rob Robillard was
planning on writing a book about her, but needed her files in order to do so.
He was denied access to those records, and sought the assistance of the state’s
Freedom of Information Commission, who pursued the case but ultimately lost.
That’s because the Connecticut
State Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that her records will remain sealed forever. The
majority argued that, since those records were made in a psychiatric hospital,
they were subject to doctor-patient confidentiality, a confidentiality that
still holds over 50 years after her death.
Neither
Robillard nor the Freedom of Information Commission are happy about the ruling,
the former because now he can’t really write that book, and the latter because
they think it violates the very ideas for which their were convened.
While the logic of the court is
solid, and those records were, at least once, subject to doctor-patient
confidentiality, the patient in this case is dead. If she has surviving family
members, it stands to reason that they should have some say in whether or not
those records are opened.
But this establishes a
dangerous precedent, especially in a country that is supposed to have an open
government, that some information can never be shared with the people. If they
had ordered the files sealed for a certain length of time, which would be one
thing, but forever?
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