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Courtroom Cover-Ups

EDITORIAL
The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) 
Sunday, September 8, 2002

THE battle over sealed records, in cases of alleged sexual abuse by priests, is just the latest round in a long fight to protect the credibility of our judicial system.

That's what's at stake: nothing less than public confidence in the mechanics of American justice.

Secret justice is a contradiction in terms. The federal judges in South Carolina know that, so they've decided, unanimously, to ban secret legal settlements, believing that closed case files make the courts complicit in covering up information the public needs and deserves - for example, about dangerous products, bad doctors and predatory clergy.

Secrecy in product liability, personal injury and sexual abuse suits comes up most often in state courts, where, at least in Kentucky, the usual practice is to file only a paper saying a settlement has been reached in a civil suit. Thus the details are never made part of the court record. This means that in many cases, the public is denied information it deserves.

Locally, we have seen the consequences of shrouding the work of the courts. Then-Circuit Judge John Potter tried, without success, to make public the details of an agreement between Eli Lilly & Co., the maker of the drug Prozac, and the victims of the Standard Gravure shooting, which excluded some evidence from trial in return for payments to victims and families.

There are innumerable examples of attempted secrecy - from the Mike Troop sexual harassment settlement here to the Wen Ho Lee plea agreement in New Mexico, from cases involving the painkiller Zomax and side-mounted GM gas tanks to injury suits involving retailers like Home Depot and Wal-Mart.

It wasn't always so. Arthur Bryant of Trial Lawyers for Public Justice told the Los Angeles Times, "This practice has exploded in the last 20 years . . . it's cheaper to hide the truth from the public."

On the other side, Harvard law professor Arthur Miller, offering the usual caveats, warns that a blanket prohibition against secret settlements could discourage the filing and settling of suits and could threaten trade secrets and personal privacy. His reasonable sounding call for flexibility will serve as welcome shelter for those who should
face a storm of criticism over promoting secrecy.

Calls for privacy sell well. They appeal to Americans' traditional fear of intrusive power, especially government. But the claim of a right to privacy, which is in no way applicable to a corporation, shouldn't trump other, more important public goals, like an open justice system.

As the 6th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared recently in rejecting the Bush Justice Department's attempt to close immigration hearings, "A government operating in the shadow of secrecy stands in complete opposition to the society envisioned by the framers of our Constitution."

In that opinion, Judge Damon Keith wrote for a unanimous panel, "Democracies die behind closed doors. . . . When the government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation."

Again this year, the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center sponsored a national poll on attitudes toward the First Amendment. It found that 48 percent of Americans believe there's too little access to government records, as opposed to 8 percent who think there's too much.

So this much is clear: Those who stand for openness are standing with the people.