The American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska has filed a lawsuit against the state Department of Law for mishandling 398 medical records seized in the January raid of a Ketchikan midwife's office.

The problem isn't with the raid, the ACLU said. The department believed the midwife was practicing and prescribing drugs after her license was suspended, a warrant was obtained, and the raid was completed with the assistance of the Ketchikan Police Department. Nothing wrong with that.

The problem, according to the ACLU, is that after the raid the records were handled in such a way that intimate information -- such as patients' sexual history, sexually transmitted infections, and abortions -- was essentially made public in the small coastal town of Ketchikan.

Shortly after the raid, and after KPD members had reviewed the records, a KPD officer taunted the daughter of a patient by saying that her mother had tested positive for an STI, according to  the suit .

"Ketchikan is a small town, so it's incumbent on the state to be very sensitive with these records, and they were not," said Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the Alaska ACLU.

Mittman said the KPD is not included in the suit because they were reasonable when approached by the ACLU about the problem, whereas Mittman feels like he got pushback from the department on the rights they believe they're entitled to.

The chief of the Ketchikan Police Department could not be reached for comment.

The ACLU is working with the Ketchikan law firm of Keene and Currall in the suit, which also names as a defendant the state Division of Corporations, Business, and Professional Licensing. The suit is brought on behalf of Marie-Jeanne Cadle and eight Jane Does ranging in age from teenagers to over 70. Each of the nine women had medical records seized in the January raid.

Eileen Small is the owner of A Woman's Place, the medical practice the department searched in January. According to the suit, Small's advanced nurse practitioner license was suspended in July 2009, but she billed Alaska Medicaid for 37 patients and wrote prescriptions for seven different pharmacies after her license was revoked.

An investigator with the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, Rebecca Starry, filed a search warrant with the District Court at Ketchikan. The day after a judge signed the warrant, Starry went to A Woman's Place along with KPD officers and seized 15 boxes containing patient files, business records, and prescription pads, according to the complaint.

The records seized included patients' entire medical files and not just portions that were dated after Small's suspension, according to the complaint. The department has had possession of the records since the raid.

The ACLU wants the department to give the records back and issue an injunction against overbroad search warrants. The ACLU also wants future cases in which documents inside and outside the scope of a legitimate search are intermingled to be handled by bringing in a neutral party who would separate the private documents from the pertinent.

The ACLU also wants the court to order the department not to use any of the information in the medical records seized from A Woman's Place to be used in any future court proceedings.

Part of the damage caused by the records being compromised, according to the ACLU, is that women in Ketchikan feel like they can't tell their doctors intimate information and trust that it will be kept private. Medical records are supposed to be protected by a federal law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (more commonly known as "HIPAA"). HIPAA's Privacy Rule mandates that organizations that maintain medical records must protect "individually identifiable health information" -- health information that can be traced to a specific individual. Civil penalties for organizations that violate the Privacy Rule can be as high as $50,000 per violation -- but according to ACLU staff attorney Tom Stenson, those rules don't apply in this case.