COEUR d'ALENE — The Kootenai County Public Defender's Office has requested more than 5,000 emails exchanged between prosecutors and public officials, all related to capital crimes.

The public records request was filed with the county June 24 by Kootenai County Deputy Public Defender Jay Logsdon. At a meeting of the Kootenai County Board of Commissioners Friday, Administrative Supervisor Nancy Jones told the board the initial public records request filed by the public defender's office matched more than 14,000 emails sent over the past two years.

Jones said she then followed up with Logsdon and asked him to further clarify the request in an effort to reduce the results. After adding new search terms, Jones said two records requests were made, each of which generated 2,500 emails.

"It's my understanding that there is a copious amount of communication between the prosecutor's office and public officials on these capital cases," said Kootenai County Chief Public Defender John Adams. "I won't have any further comment on the matter until I have reviewed those communications."

Both of those public records requests were sought and received by The Press on Friday afternoon.

The first request contains email addresses for all of the current county commissioners, as well as former Commissioner Jai Nelson. It also contains email addresses for current and past members of the seven person board of directors for the Idaho Capital Crimes Defense Fund — a voluntary capital crimes defense fund which was created under Idaho statute to reduce the trial costs of death penalty cases on counties — and the board's Idaho Association of Counties staff liason.

"Capital, Crimes, Defense, Fund (as single terms and as separate), CCDF," were the keywords associated with the request.

The second request contains the email addresses for all of the current county commissioners, Nelson, Kootenai County Prosecutor Barry McHugh, and Kootenai County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Barry Black. The terms "death penalty, murder, Morales, Renfro, capital" are included as keywords in the request.

Both requests ask the county to provide the public defender's office with emails containing the keywords dating back to 2014.

Jonathan Renfro is facing the death penalty for charges from the shooting death of Coeur d'Alene Police Sgt. Greg Moore in 2015. The public defender's office has filed motions challenging the prosecutor's intent to seek the death penalty in the case.

Angel Albertico Morales-Larranaga, 26, was sentenced to serve the rest of his life in prison, without the possibility of parole, after admitting to killing his wife and daughter at their Post Falls apartment in 2014.

When Jones typically receives a records request involving emails, she does an initial review of the results before forwarding those results to the county's legal team, she said. A county attorney then makes sure anything in the emails considered privileged information is properly marked for redaction.

"In this particular case, because of the search terms involved and because it was the public defender's office that made the request, our internal legal staff cannot do that review so I am going to have to go externally," Jones said.

Jones reached out to multiple conflict attorneys — lawyers who are contracted by the county to serve if a conflict of interest is determined to exist between an in-house attorney and a case — to see if they would be available to handle the project. She said she received a low bid of $125 an hour, with an estimate that the work would take 10 hours.