NC nonprofit still pushing for Durham County sheriff to release jail policies
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Emancipate NC sued Durham County in 2024 to unseal largely redacted jail policies.
- Sheriff Birkhead’s lawyers argued every redaction complied with public records law.
- Judge Tessener reviewed unredacted manuals, denied injunction, and set a new hearing.
EDITOR’S NOTE: At the request of Durham County, Special Superior Court Judge Hoyt G. Tessener on Oct. 9 dismissed the lawsuit seeking release of an unredacted version of Durham County Sheriff’s Office jail policies.
An anti-mass incarceration nonprofit is still fighting to force the Durham County Sheriff’s Office to release more information about its jail policies.
Emancipate NC asked a judge for help in 2024 after the Sheriff’s Office spent months responding to a records request and delivered a redacted version of the Durham County Detention Center policy manual, the group told The News & Observer.
The information withheld from the public includes the jail’s policies on inmate restraints, searches and classifications — which determine the safest housing option for detainees.
Durham is an outlier, according to the nonprofit. The group was able to obtain both Buncombe and Mecklenburg county jail policy manuals, according to exhibits filed by Emancipate NC with the Durham Superior Court earlier this month.
The nonprofit called the redactions a “cloak” that “wrongfully immunizes the Sheriff’s Office from the public eye and a key tool of the people’s self-governance,” in its first amended complaint.
“The bare minimum is that they promulgate standards to sort of limit that authority and make sure it’s within the bounds of humanity,” Elizabeth Simpson, the group’s attorney and strategic director told The N&O. “It just is very troubling to me that they won’t publicize it.”
But attorneys representing Durham County Sheriff Clarence F. Birkhead, who is the only named defendant in the civil suit, have argued the information requested by Emancipate NC doesn’t fall under North Carolina’s public records law.
“Every redaction was justified,” according to an April motion to dismiss filed by Birkhead’s lawyers. The Durham County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to The N&O’s request for comment about the ongoing legal dispute.
‘A routine records request’
Emancipate NC started investigating the Durham County jail in 2023 after it received reports that COVID-era restrictions were still being enforced, Simpson told The N&O.
That includes allegations the jail was still maintaining “solitary type conditions” where people might be in a single cell alone for up to 23 hours a day, she said.
“We were trying to investigate that and just sort of made what I thought was a routine request for their policy manual,” Simpson said, adding she wasn’t expecting the ask to be a hurdle.
The request started an eight-month process with the Durham County Sheriff’s office releasing the manual “one chapter at a time with redactions,” Simpson said.
In January 2024, the group filed the lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Office alleging a violation of the North Carolina Public Records Act.
The original complaint included interviews with people inside the Durham County jail. One told Emancipation NC they witnessed jail staff “place a detainee in the ‘Restraint Chair’ outside, during winter, for 3-4 hours with no additional clothing” beyond what the facility issues to inmates.
The jail’s restraint policy is one redacted by the Sheriff’s Office.
The Sheriff’s Office did not respond to The N&O’s request for comment on the restraint chair allegation included in the complaint.
The jail’s classification policy is also redacted from the manual. That’s the process that jails and prisons use to figure out the safest area to house a detainee, according to Simpson.
A facility may take criminal history — like violent offenses — age, sex or gender into consideration when choosing where an inmate is housed.
“The other jails, Buncombe and Mecklenburg, write down the criteria they take into account in that classification process,” Simpson said. “Durham has redacted all of that.”
Simpson said the redaction caught her eye because another section of the policy was made public. That’s an inmate’s right to appeal their classification status.
“As a lawyer that sort of struck me as a kind of absurd thing, that you could appeal a determination but not be allowed to know the factors that went into the determination,” Simpson said.
Disclosure?
Special Superior Court Judge Hoyt G. Tessener previously denied Emancipate NC’s request for preliminary injunction, which may have stopped the Sheriff’s Office from withholding the records any longer, according to the May motion.
Tessener has also denied Sheriff Birkhead’s lawyers’ request to dismiss the case, ordering both parties to mediate. The parties reported an impasse in mid-August.
Since then, unredacted copies of the jail manual were sent to Tessener for review. He is scheduled to revisit the case at a hearing on Thursday.
This story was originally published October 8, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
