Judicial records should remain open to public

he justice system warns that people who do the crime do the time. Of course, many first-time wrongdoers are able to avoid jail time, and their criminal acts are confirmed in court records. However, the state Judiciary is now considering cloaking that proof by sealing records of those who strike plea agreements and clean their behavior over designated periods. The public should not be put in the dark by such a change.

Under present Hawaii law, a person facing a first criminal charge can avoid incarceration by pleading guilty or no contest to misdemeanor or certain felony charges, and the judge can agree to erase the charges if the defendant stays out of trouble for a specific time. Nearly half of the 3,250 defendants in such cases in Hawaii succeeded in having the charges dismissed in the past fiscal year. However, the charges remain on the public record.

The state Judiciary would change that in the future by having court records of such cases wiped off the books. Information to the public would be confined to high-profile cases as they occur — but would vanish in the future if the defendant was able to meet court conditions. Locally, that is illustrated by the case of 20-year-old Australian visitor Tyson Dagley, who was granted deferral of his no-contest plea — "nolo contendere" in Latin court talk — to a misdemeanor negligent homicide charge in the watercraft collision that killed a California teenager at Keehi Lagoon last month.

Lesser instances go unnoticed unless the recipient of a plea agreement commits a crime after completing the period of lawfulness set by the judge. If those initial cases are to be removed from the record, reporters relying on court files would be in the dark about the offender’s criminal history.

The lack of recorded history also would hamper state agencies from linking recipients of deferrals to subsequent crimes in conducting background checks on volunteers or employees dealing with Hawaii’s "vulnerable population," according to the Hawaii Criminal Justice Data Center. The center would have to "manually request the cases be unlocked, requiring the use of more resources from both the HCJDC and Judiciary staff," said center administrator Liane Moriyama. Private companies would lack such a screening of potential employees’ criminal past altogether.

Documenting the information by the media would be more difficult. Ed Lynch, the Star-Advertiser’s managing editor for news, calls the proposal "an affront to the public’s right to an open and transparent judicial system." The online Hawaii Reporter, the Big Island Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Hawaii chapter have registered similar concerns.

During a period of increased openness to public records, the Judiciary has proposed a troublesome reduction of access. Instead, the courts should reject any proposal to condense the information that is important to the public.