St. Cloud Times, April 28
Enough red herrings! Allow limited use of cameras in courts
So you want to see Hillary’s emails. Or you think President Trump should release his tax records. We hate to break it to you, but you are an advocate for open government.
So let’s talk about that.
In Minnesota, we have a reasonably adequate set of rules, laws and traditions that ensure citizens can address their elected officials, watch laws being made, check the books at City Hall and generally keep tabs on how elected and appointed officials are doing the people’s work.
The Data Practices Act and the Open Meeting Law, along with local decisions like web streaming or cablecasting board and council meetings, have ensured that window on the public’s business for all of us.
But when it comes to Minnesota’s courtrooms, reasonable access goes out the window. And the arguments our elected representatives put forth for keeping a huge proportion of the population in the dark about our day-to-day judicial proceedings simply don’t hold water.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record: It’s time - well past time - for Minnesota’s courts to be opened to its citizens via access for cameras and other recording devices.
If you think you’ve heard this from us before, you have - as recently as a few weeks ago and stretching far back into years gone by.
Why keep bringing it up? Because opponents of expanded access to Minnesota’s courts via modern technology keep putting up straw men and what-ifs as their strongest arguments against allowing limited access for cameras in the courts. Worse, they are sometimes incorrectly representing what would and would not be allowed.
Most recently, Sen. Jerry Relph, R-St. Cloud, recorded a video interview (ironic, yes?) to explain his opposition.
First, he asserts that “the courts are open - come on down.” Which is absolutely true … for people who do not work at full-time jobs, people who do not have transportation or physical mobility limitations, and people who do not care for small children, just for example.
Unlike many city councils and school boards, Minnesota’s courts don’t do their work after normal business hours, which would allow many more working adults to involve themselves. Nor, at the time being, has the public been accommodated by live or recorded coverage they can watch from outside the courtroom.
Relph points out that “we’ve always had reporters in the courtroom.” We have. But reporters in all media - from TV to evolved-from-print publications like this one to radio - routinely use cameras to do that reporting, and have for decades.
If this Editorial Board were feeling argumentative we’d point out another irony: the politicians’ bipartisan and ubiquitous talking point that reporters aren’t to be trusted. But in this case, Relph and other opponents of wider access seem to be telling the public to “just trust the reporter.” Politicians simply can’t have it both ways.
Next: Opponents pound on the idea that the very limited circumstances proposed to allow cameras in the courts will somehow lead down a slippery slope of media requests for more access until all of our courthouses look like the set of “Judge Judy.”
Bunk, we say respectfully.
The dozens of other states that are ahead of us on this issue have shown this is fear-mongering, not fact. Additionally, legislators themselves will have control of whether they allow any widened access in future years. So what do they fear?
We also find the use of victims - and in the case of Relph’s videotaped position paper, female victims of sex crimes - to promote the fear of a “chilling effect” resulting in depressed reporting of crimes to be distasteful.
Why? Because the Minnesota pilot project specifically prohibits the use of cameras in sexual assault and domestic assault cases. It’s a red herring. Yet Relph, along with St. Cloud Rep. Jim Knoblach, still wrongly make that claim.
Already, there is clearly some significant proportion of victims who do not report crimes because they cannot face telling their stories to investigators, medical workers, attorneys, family, jurors and victim advocates. Relph says less than 14 percent of such victims come forward today.
We, conversely, can at least allow for the possibility that some of those 86 percent of silent victims might be deciding not to report crimes because they lack faith in a cloistered system to do justice for them.
Is the Legislature’s long history of hiding major decisions in the dark of night in the final hours of a legislative session a relevant point to raise in this context? What about the penchant for rolling scads of proposals into various omnibus bills in a veiled avoidance of public scrutiny?
We think so. Fear of the light doesn’t disappear when the topic changes.
We know that this stance puts us in opposition to powerful forces, including significant proportions of lawmakers, legal associations, prosecutors and judges.
Still, we call on our state legislators to step into the 21st century and support careful, common-sense procedures that would allow Minnesotans to oversee their third branch of government - the one that determines the fate of their family members, neighbors and the safety of their communities - in a meaningful way.
It’s time.
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Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 27
Minnesota House’s new sex harassment policy put to a quick test
With surprising immediacy, the Minnesota House’s new sexual harassment policy is being tested. The revelation Thursday that a Bemidji activist has filed a sexual assault complaint against state Rep. Rod Hamilton, R-Mountain Lake, triggered an investigative protocol that the House Rules Committee had revised only the day before.
Emily Schlecht, 23, an advocate for a sexual violence center in Bemidji, filed a police report last week accusing Hamilton, 50, of unwanted kisses and touches when she was an overnight guest in Hamilton’s St. Paul apartment on April 13, during a snowstorm. No criminal charges have been filed. The matter remains under investigation, though a St. Paul police spokesman said that as of now, “we do not feel that there is enough for a criminal case.”
Hamilton issued a statement saying “I categorically deny accusations of sexual assault” and apologizing to Schlecht for actions that, “while well-intentioned, may be viewed differently by a survivor of sexual assault, and that may have caused additional pain and hardship.” He reported the matter himself to the House’s human resources office, a nonpartisan department charged by the new policy with receiving and investigating such complaints, hiring outside investigative help at its discretion, and reporting findings to the leaders of both parties’ caucuses.
House Republican leaders responded swiftly, announcing that Hamilton’s chairmanship of the House Agriculture Finance Committee is suspended and that the new policy would govern next steps. That policy does not spell out possible disciplinary actions, which remain at the discretion of caucus leaders and/or the full House.
It’s too soon to say what should come next for Hamilton, a seven-term legislator and pork producer who won re-election in 2016 with nearly 70 percent of the vote. The House’s investigation should play out.
But this episode and the resignations late last year of two legislators who had been accused of unwanted advances say much about a change in workplace cultures, as evidenced in what may be this state’s most public workplace, the State Capitol.
There was a time not long ago when lobbyists and staffers would be counseled to keep quiet when they felt mistreated by legislators, especially those in positions of power whose favor they needed to curry in order to do their jobs. What’s more, someone who wanted to complain likely would not know to whom to turn or what would ensue if he or she did.
That’s changing, and for the better. The public nature of Schlecht’s complaint and the orderly way in which it is being handled should assure future complainants that they need not endure in silence. That assurance will be greater still if the results and consequences of the Hamilton investigation are made public. That’s not required by the new policy, which seeks to “respect the privacy as much as possible of all parties.” In this case, we would argue, fairness to all parties trumps privacy, and demands transparency.
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Mankato Free Press, April 29
Schools should determine own starting times
Getting enough sleep, of course, means better performance at school for most students. That just makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense, though, is trying to legislate a mandated school start time that doesn’t take into account the different needs of the variety of school districts and the children they serve.
Legislation proposed at the Minnesota Legislature attempts to boost performance and health of teens by mandating schools start later. The bill would prevent middle and high schools from starting earlier than 8:30 a.m. and forbid elementary student bus pickups before 7 a.m.
School start times all over the state are intertwined with how long it takes to bus kids to and from a school, what extracurriculars are scheduled before and after school, the varying competitions that require students leave school early (so they’d miss even more class time if school started later) and other factors. Later class times could throw a wrinkle in all of that for many districts.
The variables are wide and often depend on a school’s location and how far students live from it. The legislation would make no sense to the northern Minnesota district that runs from Duluth to Canada. Those children have to be picked up early in the morning or their school day would run well into the evening by the time they got home. Tailoring the start day for teens so they can sleep in would ignore the needs of those younger children to be home sooner at night.
Of course, another factor is that working parents often have to drop children off on their way to work and waiting later in the morning might not fit work schedules.
Clearly, it should be up to school districts to determine what works best for the majority of their student population. If school leaders determine their teenage students would perform better by sleeping in and starting class after 8:30 a.m., then that’s a local decision they can make based on the needs of most their students.
A parent who supports the proposal to start after 8:30 a.m. actually made a case against the legislation. She said her daughter was doing so much better after her school moved its start time back - but it was moved to 8:20 a.m., a time that wouldn’t be allowable under the proposed law.
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