Public information
It’s too bad — but not unexpected — that Rep. Kevin Ryan (R-Pawleys Island) didn’t respond to your inquiry as to why he is among 33 co-sponsors of Rep. Chris Murphy’s proposed legislation that would bar public access to virtually all law enforcement information. House Bill 4740 cuts off public access to, and I quote: “information to be used in a prospective law enforcement action or prosecution.” Note in particular the word “prospective,” which throws a blanket over virtually every single scrap of information that falls into the hands of government. It is the language reminiscent of a fascist police state.
I believe the impetus for this bill is to cut off public access to video tapes from police cruisers. Seems to me we’ve recently had several rather embarrassing incidents involving politicians — or their relatives — that were captured on police cruiser video tapes, including one drunken adulteress, a lieutenant governor trying to intimidate a police officer and, most recently, a sheriff and his deputies conducting a bizarre and potentially lethal urban highway chase involving gunfire and a K-9 dog being turned loose on a subdued individual over what turned out to be a minor traffic infraction. All of these things were captured on police cruiser video cameras, and all are embarrassing to those politicians who apparently fancy themselves a special breed.
There is absolutely no legitimate law enforcement reason for this legislation, and Rep. Murphy — a former state prosecutor and assistant United States Attorney — knows it. Police and prosecutors are already able to, and routinely do, secrete potentially prejudicial evidence during the course of investigations into serious crimes. Rep. Murphy likes to use the example of the Aiken police officer being shot to death during a traffic stop and the fact that the murder was captured on the officer’s cruiser video camera as his rationale for suppressing police or prosecutorial dissemination of public information — which the courts have repeatedly ruled video tapes to be. But Rep. Murphy knows full well that any competent defense attorney would seek a court injunction against pre-trial release of the Aiken tapes on the grounds that they could prejudice jury selection. And, he knows that any competent judge would grant such an injunction. Further, if Rep. Murphy wanted to make the Aiken argument stick, he’d have written the legislation in a way that would limit its scope to felony cases. He didn’t. And the reason he didn’t is because he really wants all police video tapes suppressed.
In the height of arrogance, his reply to critics of H4740 is that they can always go to court to try to get information if they feel all that strongly about it — which is the precise reverse of the intent of the law as it now stands. Currently, if police, a prosecutor or a defendant wants to keep a police cruiser video out of the public eye, they have to persuade a court to suppress it. If they fail, the resulting tape release is usually embarrassing to somebody in politics, or somebody close to politicians. My, what a coincidence.
H4740 is pretty typical of a police state, but it is hardly the stuff of America. The state legislators endorsing this bill need to be identified by name in each of the districts they represent. They need to be held up to public scrutiny — and they need to be remembered come the next election as politicians who believe that the strength of America is to be found in secrecy. State legislators are not “officials.” They are public servants. It is when they lose sight of that fact that we get legislation such as H4740.
Brett Phillips
Georgetown