Opinion ID: 2180233
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Privacy Interests of Deceased Persons and Their Families

Text: [¶ 22] The Superior Court did not determine whether the deceased priests should be deemed to have a residual privacy interest in the records because of the clear affirmative answer it reached regarding the public interest in disclosure of the records. Before us, Blethen asserts that the privacy interests of the deceased priests named in the Attorney General's records and their immediate family members terminated with the priests' deaths. [¶ 23] We have not previously considered whether the privacy interests protected by section 614(1)(C) continue after a person's death. The two federal circuit courts of appeals that have considered this issue in connection with the FOIA have reached different conclusions. Compare Campbell v. United States Dep't of Justice, 164 F.3d 20, 33 (D.C.Cir.1998) (concluding that deceased persons have reputational interests and family-related privacy expectations [that] survive death), with McDonnell v. United States, 4 F.3d 1227, 1261 (3d Cir.1993) (holding that deceased persons have no privacy interest subject to invasion by disclosure). More recently, the United States Supreme Court recognized in Favish that the relatives of a deceased person may invoke their own interest in personal privacy in connection with the FOIA's personal privacy exception: [W]e think it proper to conclude from Congress' use of the term `personal privacy' that it intended to permit family members to assert their own privacy rights against public intrusions long deemed impermissible under the common law and in our cultural traditions. 541 U.S. at 167, 124 S.Ct. 1570. [9] [¶ 24] Our in camera inspection of the records reveals that the passage of time has substantially dissipated or extinguished the privacy interests of the deceased priests, if any, and of their relatives. The length of time from both the alleged misconduct by the priests and their deaths is measured in decades, not years. The median number of years since the priests' deaths is twenty-five, and the average number of years since the acts of alleged abuse exceeds forty. The earliest acts of abuse are alleged to have occurred in the 1930s, and the most recent acts of abuse are alleged to have occurred not later than 1983. [¶ 25] The disclosure of allegations that might damage a deceased person's reputation and adversely affect the peace of mind of his or her family in the years immediately following death will have considerably less effect many years later. As measured by the passage of time from both the deaths of the priests and the alleged acts of abuse, any residual privacy interests of the deceased priests and their immediate family members in this case are, at most, minimal. Accordingly, we need not separately determine whether the deceased priests have privacy interests within the ambit of section 614(1)(C) that survive their deaths.