The Charleston County Sheriff’s Office violated South Carolina open records law by withholding recorded phone conversations of inmate Jamie Lee Komoroski, who’s accused of drunkenly crashing into a newlywed couple hours after their wedding.
According to the Post and Courier, retired S.C. Supreme Court justice Jean Hoefer Toal ruled on Monday that the sheriff’s office should provide media with the calls made by Komoroski from the county jail once she signs the order.
The order could reportedly take up to a few weeks but has the potential to establish the precedent that personal phone calls of inmates (mostly awaiting trial and presumed innocent) are considered public records.
“Under the Freedom of Information Act, these recordings are, in my mind, clearly public recordings,” Toal said.
As CrimeOnline previously reported, newlywed Samantha “Sam” Hutchinson, 34, was pronounced dead shortly after 10 p.m. in April, after Komoroski plowed into Samantha and her husband, Aric Hutchinson, during a fatal crash in Folly Beach.
The couple had just gotten married and were leaving their wedding reception when the fatal crash occurred.
According to an arrest affidavit, Komoroski became “uncooperative” with police and claimed she was not drunk and had a beer and one shot of tequila around an hour before the crash, NBC 2 reports. A responding officer, however, noted that Komoroski had trouble standing and smelled of alcohol.
Komoroski also “strongly refused” a field sobriety test. Police arrested her and subsequently obtained a blood test, which indicated a blood alcohol level of over four times the legal limit in South Carolina.
Initial reports indicated that the couple was on a golf cart when the incident happened, but police confirmed they were on an LSV, which is similar to a golf cart but legal to drive on roads.
After her arrest, recordings of jail conversations with friends and family obtained by the Post and Courier, indicated that Komoroski complained that her “whole life is going to be over” and insisted the deadly crash was “a freak accident obviously.”
“I didn’t mean it to happen,” she said. “I just feel like a terrible person, like, I didn’t mean for any of that to happen.”
Initially, the sheriff’s office did not object to releasing the recordings, except for one containing legal information and two others that reportedly contained personal information, such as passwords. These exemptions were allowed under FOIA.
Gray Television, the parent company of WCSC-TV Live 5 News, subsequently sued Sheriff Kristin Graziano in June after the department denied additional requests from other media outlets for the same recordings that were previously published by the Courier.
The lawsuit asserted that the sheriff’s office admitted its mistake in releasing the recordings but argued that further release of the tapes would jeopardize the defendant’s privacy, right to a fair trial, and physical safety.
Toal ultimately disagreed, adding that no attempts have been made to go through the calls to determine to provide “applicable exemptions for each recording it wanted to withhold,” according to the Courier.
“Nobody has made any attempt to go through these things,” Toal said.
Komoroski remains behind bars at the Charleston County jail. Check back for updates.
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