An attorney for the Adams County Historical Society says a century of secrets has been overturned by the Nebraska Supreme Court.

The court yesterday ordered the state to release the names of 957 people buried in a former psychiatric hospital cemetery in Hastings.

The bodies were buried in unmarked graves in the Hastings Regional Center's cemetery between 1889 and 1957.

Attorney Thomas Burke said the ruling will reduce the stigma the state was advancing by refusing to release the names. The state had argued that naming the former patients would reveal that they were institutionalized for a mental illness or for a condition serious enough to require institutionalization.

Burke says many of the people at the center were just elderly or poor, and their families couldn't afford to care for them.