It could take several weeks for the state investigative documents in the Jacob Wetterling case to be released, the Stearns County Attorney’s office said Tuesday.
The deadline to appeal a judge’s decision ordering the release of state investigative documents was July 20; no one appealed the decision, which ordered Stearns County to return FBI documents to the federal government and release the rest of the case file.
Officials with the county attorney’s office said Tuesday that they are working on returning FBI documents to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Chief Deputy County Attorney Mike Lieberg said Stearns County should complete the return in the next week or so.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office will need “some time to review the thousands of non-federal pages remaining,” Lieberg said. “We obviously do not want to release federal documents in violation of the court order.”
Jacob Wetterling’s parents, Patty and Jerry Wetterling, sued to keep part of the investigative file private, at least until a judge could review documents that they said held personal information about their marriage and family.
Several Minnesota media organizations — including the Pioneer Press — intervened, arguing that a judge in Stearns County should not rule that a constitutional privacy right can be used to override the guarantees of public access found in the Minnesota Data Practices Act, which requires most government records to be made public.
In March, Douglas County District Judge Ann Carrott ordered that thousands of pages of documents that the FBI shared with the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office be returned to the FBI. Those documents cover most of the pages that the Wetterlings were trying to keep sealed; access to those documents must be requested through the Freedom of Information Act.
In 2016, Danny Heinrich confessed to kidnapping and killing Jacob Wetterling in rural St. Joseph in 1989. Heinrich is serving a 20-year prison sentence for child pornography at the Federal Medical Center Devens in Ayer, Mass., about 40 miles northwest of Boston. FMC Devens is a prison for male inmates who require specialized long-term care, according to the prison’s website.