Sunshine Week begins March 15, 2026. The nationwide, nonpartisan initiative promotes the importance of open government and the public’s right to access public records.
When The Marshall Project - St. Louis opened in February 2025, our three reporters looked for criminal justice issues that needed to be brought to light. Deaths in custody immediately rose to the top of the list.
Engagement Reporter Ivy Scott soon realized that when reporters, researchers, attorneys and activists sought to learn how many people had died in Missouri prisons, the state’s answer kept changing. She discovered that the Missouri Department of Corrections actually hadn’t been keeping track of year-end death totals, and the numbers they’d provided were missing dozens of people.
Using repeated Missouri Sunshine Law requests to underscore the public’s right to know what its government does behind closed doors, Scott prompted the state to ultimately produce its first-ever comprehensive report of all prison deaths dating back to 2018.
Revealing the true magnitude of prison deaths, this new report alleviated confusion for families of incarcerated people and community members, and provided valuable insight for researchers, lawyers and policymakers.
Discoveries like these highlight the necessity of the state’s Sunshine Law, its federal counterpart called the Freedom of Information Act, and similar laws across the nation, to preserve, protect and defend our democracy as we enter its 250th year. Our nation was founded on the principle that information about how public agencies operate should flow freely to the people, so voters can understand how their tax dollars are being spent and make informed decisions at the polls.
One of the core functions of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from censoring information officials don’t want you to see. Sunday, March 15, is the start of Sunshine Week, which highlights the need for transparency, government accountability and civic responsibility in our country.
Sunshine laws aren’t perfect, and enforcing them can be challenging. Elected and appointed officials have dodged public records requests to protect their jobs. Requestors are often forced to sue to access documents that should be publicly available. And particularly in recent years, your right to know is under increasing threat of being rolled back in the Missouri statehouse and legislatures across the country.
Yet without a sunshine law, the public would be left in the dark — or with a false narrative curated by the very institutions that should be subject to scrutiny.
The quest for public information can illuminate very dark places. Investigative Reporter Katie Moore and The Midwest Newsroom’s Kavahn Mansouri used the Sunshine Law to tell the unvarnished story of Honesty Bishop, a transgender woman with HIV who spent six years in solitary confinement at Jefferson City Correctional Center, in what appeared to be punishment for her medical condition. Bishop went before a committee to review her placement in isolation at regular intervals. Documents obtained by the news team showed that officials noted 15 times where she had no violations since the previous review. In two of the hearings, Bishop pleaded her case, telling them: “I’ve been good.” Other public records showed that only three states, Missouri, Alaska and Michigan, singled out people with HIV in their administrative segregation policies.
As the story broke, Missouri announced it would change its policy following a lawsuit from Bishop’s family. It was too late for Bishop. She died in August 2024 after her release.
Government agencies often argue that withholding records protects investigations, personal privacy or security. Too often, though, we have seen exemptions and denials stretched beyond reason. And our reporters aren’t the only ones. In 2025 alone, the Missouri attorney general received 337 Sunshine Law complaints: nearly one for every day of the year. A third of them remain unresolved.
Sunshine laws go beyond paper documents and often include images and digital data. In response to deep community distrust of official reporting on jail deaths, Investigative Reporter Jesse Bogan shed light on the St. Louis City Justice Center. He obtained a full database of people who died in custody at the jail (including those taken to the hospital) since the notorious facility opened in 2002. Additional data and reporting showed that many people were held in jail for excessive periods of time because they were deemed incompetent to stand trial.
A subsequent story showed the state’s mental health crisis has dramatically risen over the past decade, with most of the defendants held in jails that aren’t equipped to hold or help them. Caring for these people is the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s responsibility, but in response to public records requests, the agency refused to release the list of individuals in jail awaiting state treatment or the raw numbers by judicial circuit. After months of back and forth, our story revealed the state’s efforts to address the crisis have done nothing to slow the wave of vulnerable people awaiting a treatment bed. One man with schizophrenia died while waiting in the Jackson County jail in Kansas City. How many others have died? The state said it can’t say because it doesn’t have an “existing report” responsive to the open records request.
The Marshall Project’s local mission is to create and sustain a sense of urgency around the criminal justice system in our communities and to ensure marginalized communities have their stories told.
Public records make that possible.
Public records matter because they move systems.
So here’s the challenge.
To journalists: Fight for the records. Push back on excuses. File complaints with the attorney general’s office, when necessary. Consider going to court. The delays are frustrating, the process can be slow, but the work is essential.
To residents: When reporters file records requests, we are fighting for your right to know. Pay attention to proposed changes in the law. Support efforts to improve transparency. Ask questions of your local officials.
To government leaders: Public records are not weapons. They are tools of accountability in a democracy. Sharing information may be uncomfortable, but secrecy erodes trust faster than honesty ever could.
The stories contained in public records belong to the people of Missouri.