RALEIGH - Gov. Mike Easley argued Tuesday that a judge should throw out a public records lawsuit because the newspapers that sued him haven't shown they've been denied records.

The motion, filed Tuesday in Wake County Superior Court, means that Easley might be headed to a courtroom confrontation with The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer and nine other news organizations.

The newspapers want a judge to find that the state's policies and procedures for storing and deleting public records violates the public records law. It asks a judge to order state officials to comply with the law and do what they can to retrieve deleted e-mail messages.

Current policy allows state employees to delete e-mail messages and documents if employees decide documents have no lasting value.

Easley's attorneys wrote, however, that while the public records law allows someone who has been denied a public record to ask a court to order that he or she get the record, the newspapers are improperly asking a judge to make sweeping declarations about policies and behaviors. And the newspapers cannot ask a judge to decide that someone has broken the law; that's for the criminal courts to decide, the lawyers wrote.

Hugh Stevens, an attorney for the newspapers, said in a statement that the governor's motion argues that the courts are virtually powerless to enforce the public records law.

"It appears that the governor is taking the position that if he has a public record and refuses to permit its inspection and copying, the courts can act; otherwise, he can ignore the public records law with impunity, even to the extent of destroying public records," Stevens wrote.

The filing Tuesday means that the case likely will have to be settled in a courtroom, Stevens said.

"We had hoped that we might be able to enter into meaningful settlement discussions with the attorney general and representatives of the governor. This motion would appear to foreclose this option," he said.

The newspapers sued in April after it became clear that people in the governor's press office had told other state officials to delete all e-mail messages to and from the Governor's Office.

At first the Governor's Office denied the charge, but the administration later produced notes from two other agency public information officers that showed they were told to delete e-mail messages.

Easley and others have said that regardless of what press officials said, it was not their intent to evade the law and that regardless of what public information officers were told, they did not delete public records, so no harm was done.

A story in the N&O last month revealed that at least three public information officers deleted e-mail exchanges with the Governor's Office.

Easley has convened a panel to review the state's policies on electronic public records. That panel is scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss and vote on expanded training for state employees and options for archiving e-mail messages.

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