Open-records fighters win one battle, but others loom but other battles continue

Score one significant victory this week for the public against ongoing attempts to thwart Americans’ right to know.

The American Bar Association, which is meeting in San Francisco for its annual meeting, “threw in the towel” on a proposal to close tens of millions of arrest and court records to the public, according to Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor who is co-chairman of the ABA's Commission on Effective Criminal Sanctions.

Saltzburg said the commission spent two years drafting the proposal. The panel should not have wasted its time. Once its unsavory contents became public, it took less than two weeks for the court of American public opinion to torpedo it.

American newspapers, including The Vindicator, and other business and public interest groups lampooned the misguided plan. And rightfully so. It represented a wholesale assault on the spirit of American jurisprudence.

What the proposal sought

As the draft was written, it would have urged federal, state and local governments to immediately “limit access” to records of closed criminal cases without convictions to everyone except law enforcement agencies. It also sought to automatically seal misdemeanor and felony conviction records “after the passage of a specified period of law-abiding conduct.”

The recommendations blurred the important distinctions between fairness to those charged with crimes and respect to the principles of an open judicial system.

The ABA committee pushing for the change argued that landlords and employers who have easy access to court files through records-checking services sometimes unfairly refuse to hire or rent to people who have been arrested or convicted.

We agree with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press that argues that weakening all Americans’ access to public records is the wrong way to address real or perceived discrimination against those charged with or convicted of crimes.

“We’ve always said that if discrimination is the problem, then directly address the problem, don’t try to hide reality or hide the historical record,” said Lucy Dalglish, the group’s executive director.

In addition, sealing such records would encourage a growth industry in privately run but potentially shoddy and incomplete databases. That would result in a truly unfair network of names of those who work their way through the nation’s courts.

Other battles continue

While the decision to scrap the ABA proposal is heartening, it in no way should encourage public-records and open- government supporters to let down their guards.

On local, state and federal levels throughout the nation, attacks on Americans’ right to hear public discussions and view public documents continue. Although few go as far as the wholesale assault in the ABA proposal, most work to slowly chip away at fundamental constitutional rights. Let the ABA victory spark action to expose and fight all other attempts to quash the public’s right to know.