Law must be equal

Attorney General Rob McKenna has been a strong advocate for open government. If you care about access to public records and openness of public meetings in Washington state, you owe him thanks. So there is no reason to suspect that McKenna has a hidden, sinister motive for supporting legislation aimed at discouraging prison inmates’ requests for public records.

That doesn’t make it a good idea, however.

We sympathize with McKenna’s concern that convicts with plenty of time on their hands have created what he calls a “cottage industry” out of filing records requests. The incentive, at least in some cases, is that if an agency such as the state Department of Corrections wrongly fails to comply, the requesting prisoner is in a position to collect court-awarded penalties ranging from $5 to $100 a day.

Some inmates file hundreds of requests, seeking thousands of pages of documents, creating an administrative burden on public officials. Inmates, like everyone else, can be charged reasonable copying fees under the law, however, and existing laws give agencies strategies for making compliance more practical. Faced with massive requests, for instance, they can respond in batches and require payment of copying costs before moving on to the next batch.

It’s when they refuse to turn over records subject to legitimate requests that they get in trouble.

While Senate Bill 6294, now before the Legislature, wouldn’t let an agency escape penalties for failing to obey the law, it would divert any payments, which now go to the inmate, to a state fund that is dedicated to compensation for crime victims. Presumably, with nothing to gain, inmates would lose interest and the volume of requests would go down.

There won’t be much hand-wringing among the law-abiding public if troublemaking criminals are no longer able to game the system. Hand-clapping is more like it.

But as a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union noted, it’s troubling when decisions about enforcing the law start to differentiate between favored and disfavored groups of citizens.

Equal treatment under the law is a pillar of the American system of self-government. The real test of our commitment to that system is whether we defend its core principles on behalf of even the least popular citizens in the most dubious circumstances. This is especially so when it’s an arm of government, such as the Legislature, that makes those distinctions.

Remember, Washington citizens enacted the public disclosure law as an initiative three decades ago, precisely because they didn’t trust the government to be honest with them.

The rationale being offered in support of SB6294 is appealing but deceptive. The best way to counteract what one of McKenna’s deputies has called a “lottery” is for all public agencies to be resolute in honoring requests for public records. No violations, no penalties, no incentive for frivolous requests.

That approach, unlike SB6294, protects two important American values – open government and equal rights.