“Exceedingly chagrined” that a newspaper had published details about a controversial child custody hearing that she had wanted to keep secret, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Maria Sampedro-Iglesia calendared a court hearing for Aug. 26 to ferret out who leaked.

But a day before the scheduled proceeding, an attorney for the Miami-Dade court system told The Miami Herald’s lawyers there would be no hearing. Their presence wasn’t needed.

What court administrators didn’t say: All the courtroom participants under suspicion of talking were going to be in court anyway that morning — at a conference the public was forbidden to attend. And Sampedro-Iglesia had another plan. She was going to require all of them to sign sworn statements that they had not betrayed her trust.

“Where, as here, confidential information is leaked, the Court is vested with the authority to take additional measures to ensure the children are protected and the Court’s orders are followed,” she wrote.

The fight over courtroom access and records concerned the fate of 10-year-old Victor Barahona, who was found Feb. 14 by a road ranger on the side of Interstate 95 in West Palm Beach, convulsing and drenched with chemicals inside his adoptive father Jorge Barahona’s pickup truck. Jorge Barahona was nearby, on the ground, also ill. The decomposing body of Victor’s twin sister, Nubia, was later found soaked in chemicals and shoved inside a trash bag in the truck..

Police and prosecutors later said the twins had been “tortured” for months inside the Barahonas’ Miami-Dade home.

The case has come to symbolize the longstanding tensions between the rights of abused children to keep private the details of their suffering — versus the public’s desire to hold its government accountable. In the months following Nubia’s death, The Miami Herald went to court four times seeking to compel the release of records or fight efforts to close to the public hearings about the Barahona children. The details surrounding the efforts of Sampedro-Iglesia and State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle to identify leakers are contained in court records the newspaper obtained this week after filing suit for their release.

“One of the greatest privileges our Constitution provides is free press afforded by the First Amendment; however, the children in this case deserve their right to privacy, and it is this Court’s responsibility to protect these children,” Sampedro-Iglesia wrote in an order.

But Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center, who is helping Florida’s Department of Children & Families improve foster care under a private grant, said privacy concerns often have been used to shield public officials from scrutiny. “Agencies act,” she said, “as if the privacy is there to protect them. It is not. It is supposed to protect the child.”

In the weeks following the twins’ discovery, The Herald published a series of stories documenting critical lapses in the state’s supervision of the former foster children.

The Barahonas had been allowed by the state to adopt the twins in 2009 even though “the red flag of caution and warning was raised many times” by people around the family, including a principal and a volunteer guardian , according to the report done by a panel that investigated how the system failed. Even as Nubia’s body was discovered, two reports to the state’s abuse hotline had gone unheeded.