CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - The North Carolina medical examiner's office says it is dropping a standardized checklist for suspicious infant deaths after learning the information in those reports must be made public.
The Charlotte Observer reported Saturday that the change in policy comes after the attorney general issued an opinion on the newspaper's public records request for those reports.
For years, the state medical examiner's office encouraged police to use the checklist to investigation suspicious infant deaths.
A recent series in The Observer found that police frequently fail to investigate cases of sudden infant death syndrome. In many of those cases, there was evidence that the babies might have suffocated.
The state's lead child death investigator Lisa Mayhew says the checklist is a valuable tool, but contains information that should be kept confidential.
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