Earnhardt autopsy is a public matter

Two days before John Ruiz' upset of Evander Holyfield last Saturday night, a sympathetic reporter approached Don King and pointed out in passing that The World's Greatest Promoter appeared to face enough trouble selling out the 12,000seat Mandalay Bay Events Centre without the added competition from the Daimler-Chrysler 400 Winston Cup race scheduled to be run at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway the next day.

"You have it wrong, young man," admonished King. "We're not in competition with NASCAR. We are working in a spirit of co-operation with our redneck friends!"

King presumably intended no slight, and he was correct suggesting the image of auto racing as a sport for tobacco-chewing hillbillies is a widely shared perception in America. Put it this way: in certain parts of the US - the demographics are inexact, but if you figured on the same States that voted for George W Bush you wouldn't be far wrong - NASCAR coverage fairly dominates the sports pages. In others, as in Boston, where I work, the winner of a weekly Winston Cup race is lucky if he gets his name on the agate page.

All of that has changed over the past few weeks. On the afternoon of February 18th, Dale Earnhardt, a veteran of 676 Winston Cup races and the sport's all-time wins leader, slammed into a wall on the final lap of the Daytona 500. He was dead by the time help arrived.

The national outpouring of grief came as something of a shock to those of us who had blithely assumed stock-car racing to be the exclusive province of the Deliverance crowd.

And now, three weeks after his death, Earnhardt's fatal accident has transcended sport itself. It looms a bone of contention in a First Amendment battle that has been joined by newspapers which might never before have devoted so much as a paragraph to auto racing.

Racetrack deaths are hardly uncommon - the 49-year-old Earnhardt was the fourth NASCAR driver to be killed in combat this season - but this one has moved with alacrity from the newsroom to the courtroom as the centrepiece of a familiar battle pitting freedom of the press against respect for the dead.

The crash that killed Earnhardt was in itself unremarkable. (Which, it turns out, is part of the problem.) He had just taken the lead at Daytona when he was brushed by another driver and bounced off a wall at turn four (at 180 m.p.h.) in a vain attempt to regain control. There had been a far worse, or far more spectacular, crash earlier in the race. Mike Waltrip, Earnhardt's friend, seized the opportunity to take the lead and finish first. Earnhardt's son, Dale jnr, sped past the wreck to finish second - and then returned to check on the condition of his father.

Death appears to have been virtually instantaneous. Firefighters had to first cut the top off his car to get to him.

"He was unconscious and unresponsive from the time of the first paramedic's arrival," reported Dr Steve Bohannon, the Daytona Speedway's director of emergency medical services. "He was not breathing and had no palpable pulse from the time of the first paramedic's arrival, and remained that way throughout."

A few days later came word that a defective seat belt, and not the impact of the crash itself, may have been responsible for Earnhardt's fatal injuries.

A Florida newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel, requested access to the autopsy photographs. Just a few days before Earnhardt's death, the same paper had published the results of a six-month investigation into NASCAR safety, and its editors said they wanted to submit the autopsy results to medical experts for independent verification.

Under Florida law, the records are public and available to all, but Teresa Earnhardt, the driver's widow, filed suit in Volusia County to keep them out of the newspaper's hands, calling it an invasion of privacy "when I haven't even had time to grieve".

If nothing else, recent events in the political arena have aptly demonstrated that the State of Florida is a veritable spawning ground for stupid judges, and Mrs Earnhardt had little difficulty locating one.

Despite assurances from the newspaper it had no intention of actually publishing the photographs in question, Circuit Court Judge Joseph Will bought her argument and issued a temporary injunction barring their release.

The Sentinel responded by suing for access to the autopsy photos. It has subsequently been joined in the case by four other newspapers - the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and the Tampa Tribune - and Orlando's NBC television affiliate. The Society of Professional Journalists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the First Amendment Foundation, and an organisation representing the Associated Press Sports Editors have backed the newspaper's position.

The groundswell of opposition from Redneck Nation has been formidable.

Responding to public pleas from his widow, Earnhardt's fans have bombarded Florida Governor Jeb Bush with over 12,000 emails demanding he stop the newspaper's quest. The Sentinel has received 10,000 emails, most of them criticising its position.

"I don't blame people for looking at this at first blush and saying `Oh, my God, this is ghoulish'," says Sentinel editor Timothy Franklin. "I hope they understand that we're trying to get credible, independent information - being sensitive to the family by not running the photos - about how Dale Earnhardt died."

"What is getting lost in the debate," adds Ray Marcano, the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, "is whether the government has a right to withhold records that are clearly public. And the answer is simple: the government does not, and should not even try."