Your right to access information about how your government operates suffered one negative news story (at the state level) and two positive developments (at the federal level) in recent days. We’ll start with the bad news from Olympia.The state Senate is considering a bill that would restrict public access to juvenile criminal records. Rowland Thompson of Allied Daily Newspapers of Washington said in a written statement: “This is a sea change in how all this is done.” Even if there were a strong argument for such a sea change, it would still erode the public’s right to know, which in this case is enshrined in the state constitution. But as it is, the argument is flimsy.
Representatives of the juvenile defense bar and public defenders argue that young people who have committed crimes are unfairly kept from getting jobs and scholarships because of public access to information about those crimes. In an Associated Press story, state Sen. Nick Harper, D-Everett, said: “This bill gets at what it is we’re really trying to address, which is emphasizing the rehabilitative nature of the system, not the punitive nature of it.”
That argument might work for the juvenile criminals, but it seriously curtails the rights of employers and officials who award scholarships, not to mention the public. They need to know what shadows lurk in the backgrounds of young people. And even if full recovery and restitution is made and punishment served, the information should still be available to the public. In fact, such a turnaround in a young person’s life could even weigh in his or her favor.
A more rational argument is presented by Tom McBride of the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys: “Is the solution to hide that information? It seems more healthy to deal with that than to push it away.”
