Reporter Tom Pappert: There are ‘Layers of Reversal Error’ in Judge’s Decision to Not Release Covenant School Shooter Writings

Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said there are “layers of reversal error” in Tennessee Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea L. Myles’ ruling last Thursday that not one page of the materials written by Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale will be released to the public.

On July 4 at 11:58 pm, Myles ruled that not one page of Hale’s wiring shall be released to the multiple parties who sued Metro Nashville to secure their release, citing the copyright claims of the parents she earlier allowed to intervene in the lawsuit.

Myles declared in her ruling, “materials created by Hale are exempted from disclosure based on the federal Copyright Act.”

The judge’s ruling stems from her May 2023 decision to allow parents from the Covenant School, the Covenant School, and the Covenant Presbyterian Church to intervene in the case after Hale’s family claimed they assigned them the copyright of her written materials.

The intervenors say they own the copyright to Hale’s works through an entity known as the Covenant Children’s Trust.

On Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pappert said the judge not only made a mistake in allowing the intervenors to intervene in the case but also deciding the case based on the intervenors.

“I think there are layers of reversal error here. It starts with allowing the interveners to intervene and it ends with basically deciding the case based on the interveners,” Pappert said.

“To me, it seems as though once this goes outside the purview of a judge who received a DEI scholarship – and seems to have three inch long nails in every photograph I’ve seen of her – it seems as though a judge is going to look at this and say, very clearly, these people never should have been involved in this case. If they have a claim to copyright, then they’re going to have to go through civil courts after the diaries, the journals, and the manifesto are published. This is ridiculous,” Pappert added.

In regards to the intervenors’ argument that Hale’s writings belong to the Covenant Children’s Trust, Pappert noted that the claim has not been confirmed in the Tennessee probate court proceedings initiated by an attorney on behalf of Audrey Hale’s parents.

Hale’s parents petitioned the probate court to open an intestate estate for their daughter, the school killer, on June 15, 2023. More than a year later, that case appears to remain open, meaning legal ownership of Audrey Hale’s writings has not formally been transferred to her parents.

In that petition, the killer’s parents also attested that their daughter “died intestate,” meaning that she did not leave a will behind despite the killer writing in a recently-uncovered suicide note, “PLEASE READ MY WILL.”

To this, Pappert said Hale’s will should have been decided to be valid or not by the probate court, not by her parents or other entities.

“I would also be interested in knowing, did you find some document that said this is Audrey Hale’s will and then you didn’t consider it valid? Because it seems to me, and I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that the probate court should have made that decision. It should have been presented and allowed to be determined whether or not it was a legally sufficient document to be considered a will. Instead, it seems as though they’ve ignored it,” Pappert said.

In regards to the entirety of the case and the killer’s writings remaining under wraps – with the exception of The Star’s obtaining of over 80 pages of the killer’s journal recovered from her vehicle on the day of the shooting, documents from the police investigation, and crime scene photos – Pappert said the withholding of the materials appears to be part of an agenda to protect the “mental health establishment” and “transgender lobby.”

“If you look at this as a political machination from people who are democratically aligned – let’s say they may or may not be Democrats, they may or may not be partisan actors, but they’re fellow travelers – and what they want…is the medical community to be protected. They want the transgender lobby to be protected and they want to talk about guns. They figured out pretty quickly on this one with a mentally ill person that they could not make this about guns, so now all they have left is defending the transgender lobby and the mental health establishment,” Pappert said.

Watch the full interview:

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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Tom Pappert” by The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.