Atta boy, Governor

We were not expecting this particular announcement from Gov. Sean Parnell’s office as we were working to put together today’s newspaper: “Governor Vetoes Bill Restricting Access to Criminal Court Records,” reads the headline.

Like numerous media outlets in the state, we went on record opposing Senate Bill 108, which would have made court records confidential if a defendant were acquitted, or if charges were dropped. We, like most of the other media outlets speaking out against the bill, argued that it is a dangerous thing to make a public process less transparent. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a case with big public importance — political corruption, say — is locked away in secrecy before the public has a chance to see what happened.

We had assumed, though, that the tide of public opinion was not moving in our favor, and seeing the governor come out boldly against the bill would be a long-shot.

We are pleased to find out otherwise.

“The provisions in Senate Bill 108 attempted to solve a complex issue that requires striking the right balance between open and transparent criminal court proceedings, the rights of crime victims, and the rights of persons who have been accused, but never convicted, of a crime,” the governor’s statement reads. “Unfortunately, the legislation summarily swept all such cases under the cloak of confidentiality in an unnecessarily broad manner, without respect to likely adverse impacts on the public. In my view, the legislation unnecessarily restricted access to criminal court records, which would have adversely affected the ability of Alaskans to protect themselves and to hold their judicial system accountable. Additionally, the proposed law would be vulnerable to legal challenge,” the statement continued.

We agree and made similar points in a pair of editorials calling on the Legislature and governor to abandon this effort.

Further, the governor pointed out that an administrative rule change had already pulled from the databases records for people who are arrested, but not charged, people whose charges are dropped for lack of probable cause, people whose charges are dropped because of a case of mistaken identity, minors wrongly charged in adult court, and people who have had protective orders filed against them that are dismissed before their initial hearing for a lack of probable cause.

Quiet honestly, we have no real problem with those changes. These are the people who least deserve to be in the database. We do, however, urge that in conjunction with those changes the system maintain publicly available statistics on just how many people are dragged into court without probable cause or arrested without a charge.

Now that SB 108 is dead, we also should move on to find a workable solution to the problem the bill was crafted to fix — that searchable online court records can mar the reputations of innocent people.

We renew calls for more information here rather than less, for court records to be clearly labeled on the first page of the record’s search as exonerations, and for greater online access to full court files.

But, for now, we’ll just say, atta boy, Governor! You did the right thing here.