The Frontier is suing the Oklahoma Department of Corrections after the agency refused to release incident reports on deaths and other violent incidents.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Oklahoma County District Court, claims the records are public under state law. Leslie Briggs, a Tulsa attorney with the nonprofit Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press, is representing The Frontier in the case.
Correction officers found Cory Aaron Stegall dead with his head wrapped in a plastic bag and shoved underneath his prison bunk bed at the Allen Gamble Correctional Center in Holdenville in December 2024, according to an autopsy report.
The 37-year-old was serving a 30-year sentence for child sexual abuse and feared for his life in prison, his father said. Three months before his death, he frantically sent his father, Johnny Stegall, two text messages from his state-issued tablet, urging him to call the medium-security prison because other prisoners were threatening to kill him.
The Department of Corrections did not respond to The Frontier’s questions about staffing at the prison. The Frontier has previously reported on stabbings and other violent incidents at understaffed state prisons.
“This prison is worse. It’s a hardcore prison,” Cory Stegall wrote from his tablet, “People get stomped out daily on the pod I live on.”
Johnny Stegall said he called the prison, and an employee assured him they would move his son. But he said the transfer never happened. Three months later, his son was dead. Johnny Stegall said he tried to call the facility to get information about his son’s death, but no one returned his call. He said it made him feel “insignificant.”
Prosecutors charged Cory Stegall’s cellmate, Dymail Reicher, with first-degree murder for his death.
The Frontier filed a request under the Oklahoma Open Records Act for incident reports on Cory Stegall’s death and other records of violent incidents at the Allen Gamble prison after learning of an uptick in violent incidents at the facility. A prison warden acknowledged the recent violence at a state Board of Corrections meeting in April.
But the Oklahoma Department of Corrections denied The Frontier’s records request. Kay Thompson, a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections, said the agency will deny open records requests for the documents going forward.
“We constantly re-evaluate our processes to ensure that they align with current best practices, policies and applicable statutes,” Thompson said in an email. “After reviewing policy and the ORA statute, we’ve determined that investigation and incident reports are not public records.”
Rep. Justin Humphrey, R, Lane told The Frontier that he received incident reports from the agency, but the agency did not give him the investigation reports he requested. The department policy states investigative reports are confidential.
Humphrey, the vice chairman of the House Public Safety Committee, has voiced concerns over inmate safety and treatment and said it’s his duty as an elected official to ensure the agency operates as intended. Incident reports are critical to ensuring transparency, he said.
The Frontier routinely requests incident reports from the Department of Corrections to report on violence and staffing shortages at prisons. The Department of Corrections released similar incident reports to The Frontier less than a year ago for deaths from the Lawton Correctional Center, a facility operated by the for-profit company The GEO Group.
The Department of Corrections told The Frontier in an email on May 20, that the agency will no longer release records from private prisons either.
Incident reports should be public records under state law, said Joey Senat, a journalism professor and open records expert at Oklahoma State University.
Humphrey filed a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections in May, claiming the agency and legislative leaders have attempted to keep information from him.
Johnny Steagall said his son had accepted accountability for his crimes. He said he believes the Department of Corrections failed his son.
“I believe it was deliberate indifference from the guards, because they knew that the man that they put in with my son was a murderer and he was violent,” he said.
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