The Portland Press Herald is taking the court system to task for failing to live up to an agreement to correct an improper practice of sealing court records en masse–rather than undertaking an individualized review of each case prior to sealing them.
“The latest case concerns the state’s Judicial Branch, which for years has been automatically sealing from public view cases in which charges were ultimately dismissed – restrictions that a federal appeals court has ruled unconstitutional.
The courts were notified of the problem in 2015 and, pushed by the Lewiston Sun Journal and other media organizations, promised to rectify it in 2016. But the changes were never made.
A Sun Journal reporter last month realized the cases were still being sealed. A court spokeswoman said that a computer program was inadvertently not updated and has now been fixed.
It’s impossible to know how many requests for these public records have been wrongly rejected in the four years since this problem was first discovered – or to put it another way, how many times a member of the public has been kept from getting the information he or she is legally entitled to.”
See Editorial: Our View: Maine public’s right to know shouldn’t be an afterthought
Portland Press Herald, November 20, 2020