Keegan Kyle

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

MADISON - Today marks the three-week anniversary of our ongoing quest for prison records related to Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, the Manitowoc County convicts portrayed in the popular Netflix series “Making a Murderer.”

The success of our quest remains unclear, though a Department of Corrections spokeswoman said nearly a week ago that she was “hopeful it will be completed in the near future.”

For those just joining our quest, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin is seeking a variety of records from state prison officials under government transparency laws, including:

Emails referencing the men and the Netflix series

Internal prison memos referencing the men

Documents describing inmate access to news and entertainment

Our primary goal is to obtain these records and share them with readers who’ve shown sustained interest in learning more about the “Making a Murderer” case. We’re also taking this opportunity to shed light on our work and open records laws.

In some states, but not Wisconsin, government agencies must respond to requests for documents within a certain number of days. Here, the key language in state law is “as soon as practicable and without delay.”

Department of Justice officials penned guidelines on this section of the state law in 2012, advising that 10 working days is generally reasonable for simple requests but more time is OK in complex cases. What’s reasonable, the officials wrote, may also depend on staff resources.

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Three weeks might seem like an unreasonable delay to some folks, but the Department of Corrections has previously told us that merely searching emails for keywords was not as simple as we expected.

We initially requested the department release any emails sent or received by its employees that included the keywords Avery, Dassey, Making a Murderer or Netflix. However, spokeswoman Joy Staab said, the department was incapable of searching all employee accounts at once; each had to be searched individually.

Staff resources have also been a challenge for the department. In November, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin reported how worker shortages across the prison system had ballooned overtime costs footed by taxpayers. The bill for job vacancy overtime grew by $1.6 million to about $11 million during the 2014-15 fiscal year.

We acquiesced to narrowing the email search to 17 top prison officials as well as the warden and deputy warden in each maximum security facility. Still, that was 13 days ago and we’ve received no formal response from the Department of Corrections on whether it will provide records and, if so, exactly when.

We hope that our quest ends soon, but for now, the status is still stay tuned.

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Keegan Kyle is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. He can be reached at kkyle@gannett.com or on Twitter @keegankyle.