WASHINGTON
Seattle Times
Seattle Times Editorial
THE Washington state Constitution is unequivocal about public access to courts. Section 10 reads, “Justice in all cases shall be administered openly, and without unnecessary delay.”
But in practice, it is not so simple. There is an obvious tension between institutional transparency and individual requests for privacy. Courts, for example, protect psychiatric-commitment records and allow plaintiffs in sensitive civil cases to proceed with initials only, yet they conduct child welfare hearings in the open.
That balancing act is now threatened by a disturbing proposal to throw the blanket of secrecy over a vastly larger set of court records. A judicial subcommittee has proposed a change to a court rule, General Rule 15, which was heard on Monday by the full Supreme Court. The court should reject the change.
The proposal lowers the legal threshold for sealing an array of records, particularly in civil cases, and it would grant near-total secrecy to criminal cases that don’t end in a conviction.
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