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Saturday, August 11, 2007
Courts - "Closing courts, erasing history"
The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a must-read editorial today opposing the ABA proposal to seal many criminal records. It begins:
Five years before he killed four people in a Bayer Avenue home, Joseph Corcoran was acquitted of slaying his parents. If a committee of the American Bar Association has its way, records of Corcoran’s arrest and trial in his parents’ killing would be sealed off from public view.If the full bar association approves the committee’s proposal, it would start lobbying states and Congress to pass laws that would wipe out from public view records of the arrest and trial of O.J. Simpson, who was acquitted, Claus von Bulow, whose conviction was overturned, Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, whose conviction was set aside after his death – and anyone else who was charged but not ultimately convicted of a crime.
Even the records of people who are convicted should be sealed from public view after a certain amount of time has passed and they are not arrested on new charges, the committee proposes.
Lawyers have a valid concern that people arrested but never convicted of a crime and people who have followed laws for years after a conviction are too often wrongly denied jobs and housing. But the bar association proposes an un-American, Orwellian solution: Pretend the arrests and convictions never happened, and limit access to those records only to an inner circle of law enforcement insiders.
The proposal would inform people whose records have been sealed that, when asked, they can deny ever being arrested or convicted – unless a law enforcement official asks the question.
This proposal to close off public court and police records comes at a time when too many courts are already sealing too many civil records, often improperly.
Investigations by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Seattle Times and Miami Herald found that a number of cases just happened to involve lawyers, judicial colleagues and relatives, friends of judges, politicians and police officers.
The sealed records would still be available to court personnel, and previously sealed convictions could be used in weighing sentences. But they would be hidden from most of the public, making it difficult to impossible to monitor the court system for fairness, corruption and trends, not to mention wiping out historical records. And sealing records would raise a host of questions when the crimes involve pedophiles and other sex offenders.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 11, 2007 11:20 AM
Posted to Courts in general