Correspondent Richard Fausett describes how an email obtained thru Georgia's open records law "blew open" the story of Ahmaud Arbery's shooting in "a very closed system." An incident report, a 911 call, and a local prosecutor's email laying out the case for no probable cause.

After making an open records request to police and county officials, Fausett received a response.

"When I opened this fat email attachment, I knew immediately that I had found something pretty explosive.

"The first document in this file was a three-page memo written by a district attorney in Waycross, Georgia named George Barnhill, who at the time was the prosecutor in the case. And the prosecutor in a case like this often advises the local police as to whether or not there's sufficient probable cause to go to a judge and ask for an arrest warrant.

"Mr. Barnhill, in this letter, laid out an extensive justification — legal justification — for why he believed there was not sufficient probable cause to issue any arrest warrants for anyone.

"And his argument was that Mr. Arbery had committed a burglary, and that the men who pursued him were justified in pursuing him under Georgia's Citizen Arrest law. It said that the man who shot Ahmaud Arbery, Travis McMichael, was justified in doing so because Mr. Arbery had grabbed the shotgun. He had initiated the fight. And Travis McMichael was allowed to use deadly force to protect himself under Georgia's Use-of-Force statute. And it said, of course, that the men were legally armed under Georgia's open-carry law. But there were a lot of pieces of this that I knew a lot of lawyers and even other prosecutors were very likely going to take issue with.

"In Mr. Barnhill's words, it was his conclusion there was insufficient probable cause to issue arrest warrants at the time.

"What's explosive here is that you have this well-detailed legal justification for an action that I knew many people would see as one that just violates their basic sense of what's right. You had two armed white men in a truck chasing after an unarmed black man in a suburb in the deep south. There's a confrontation. The black man is shot and killed. And no one has been arrested. And there's an argument now, a legal argument, that no one should be arrested.

"For me, it was just a very surreal moment because I'm thinking back to that moment, which is a very private one. I'm in my house. The country is locked down. This email comes. And it has this very controversial legal opinion from a very obscure prosecutor.

"And I felt like one person in on a conversation in a very closed and constrained system. And now, it seems like this whole story has just been blown out into the open."

This is why public records laws in Kentucky, and across the country and the world, matter.