Lyons: Search warrants need some sunshine
Journalism never is as simple as something you heard.
Things often aren’t as they seem. What you heard on a police scanner announced as an armed robbery might not have been. What was widely reported in gossip circles to be a double murder in Marengo might turn out to be an unfortunate death of natural causes.
We know this. We live this. A large part of the job is sorting through fact and fiction. Most people don’t purposely misrepresent events or situations, although some definitely do.
That’s not to say we’re perfect. Some journalists are looser than others with facts. Sometimes we make careless mistakes despite best intentions. Sometimes we fall for it when misled intentionally or accidentally.
One of the key ways to get facts is through documents. That’s why journalists are constantly jumping up and down screaming about a lack of access to records that should be available for public scrutiny.
Our favorite kind of documents are court documents. And the best kind of court documents are of the sworn variety. This means that someone swore under oath and under penalty of perjury that the information they are relaying is accurate. Journalists possess no such legal power to compel the truth.
For whatever reason, McHenry County courts have consistently limited access to some key court documents – search warrants. Those documents are gold mines of information on criminal cases. They essentially lay out what law enforcement officials believe they will find in a search and ultimately what they did find.
That process is a significant step in a criminal case and is worthy of scrutiny. We aren’t suggesting that we should have access the moment police leave a residence wearing paper booties, but soon after the investigation is over. An appropriate time would be after an arrest was made or not made and when an officer or law enforcement agent has submitted an inventory of items seized.
We’re citizens, too, and not interested in trampling over active criminal investigations. But we do serve the public’s interest in presenting an accurate and full account of a case, which is imperative to an open and fair judicial system.
As reported Sunday by Jillian Duchnowski, recent opinions from Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and the Illinois Supreme Court state that in most instances, search warrant records should be available to the public, yet that’s usually not the case.
So far this year, less than a quarter of McHenry County’s 140 search warrants were not under court seal. By comparison, less than 2 percent of Kane County search warrants were still sealed.
It’s been a longstanding practice for judges to keep search warrants sealed here. But powdered wigs used to be in vogue, too. We’ll be watching to see whether this trend improves.
• Kevin Lyons is news editor of the Northwest Herald. Reach him at 815-526-4505 or e-mail him at kelyons@nwherald.com.
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