Aaron T. Gunn, a politically connected former teacher has avoided the sex offender registry for two years after pleading guilty to having sex with an eighth-grade student.

State Representative Chuck Espy, a Democrat from Clarksdale, was a scheduled character witness for Gunn. The judge says that during the trial, Espy patted Gunn on the back and nodded at jurors. Thomas said the show of support from a member of a politically connected family could have swayed the jury so he called off the trial.
Full Story

Wikipedia is a web-based free content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. It currently contains about 2 million articles.

Anybody can anonymously create a Wikipedia entry or modify an existing entry. A new WEB site maps Wikipedia entries to the known Internet addresses of several political and commercial entities.

The Open Records Project believes that Wikipedia is a valuable free resource of information. We also believe that transparency of authorship will tend to maintain the quality level of the content.
Full Story

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cites her experience as a compelling reason voters should make her president, but nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her White House years are locked up in a building here, obscuring a large swath of her record as first lady.

Clinton’s calendars, appointment logs and memos are stored at her husband’s presidential library, in the custody of federal archivists who do not expect them to be released until after the 2008 presidential election.

Asked how long it might be before Hillary Clinton’s records are released, the library’s chief archivist said it could take years.

What records that have been made public offer tantalizing details about Hillary Clinton’s White House years. One memo reveals details about the “war room” for the healthcare plan. Aides wrote of the need for secrecy, but also presented Hillary Clinton with arguments she could make that the process of drawing up a healthcare plan was “the most open in the history of the federal government.”

Or maybe not so much.
Full Story

AT&T Inc said on Thursday a company it hired to handle the cybercast of a live concert by U.S. rock band Pearl Jam erroneously omitted lyrics criticizing U.S. President George Bush that were in a song performed by the band.

“AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media,” the band said.
Full Story

The 400,000-member American Bar Association’s policy-making body, the House of Delegates, is scheduled to vote on the resolutions at the group’s national convention in San Francisco on Aug. 13 and 14. One proposal recommended by an ABA commission urges local, state and federal governments to seal the records of criminal cases in which convictions were not obtained.

“I believe people should be given a second chance, especially when those crimes were committed when a person was very young,” said state Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee), one of the bill’s co-sponsors. Other co-sponsors are Marlin Schneider (D-Wisconsin Rapids), Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee), and Annette Polly Williams (D-Milwaukee).

These arguments sound familiar to those of us who fought to make the Sex Offender Registries public. Everybody needs a second chance. However, the only way to predict the future is to measure past behavior.

We suggest that those legislative advocates for second chances demonstrate their commitment to the cause by hiring some of these individuals to babysit their children.
Full Story

Why would the largely privately-funded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum want to restrict access to historical archives in contradiction to its stated purpose to exist in the first place? If the records support the long-told official story, one would think that the the museum would want the widest possible distributed access to the actual historical record.
Full Story

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Wikipedia

The Open Records Project suggests that crime control cameras be publicly accessible.

A crime-ridden high street in north London has been branded the most spied-upon road in Britain, after it emerged that it is watched over by more than 100 closed circuit television cameras.

“Having so many cameras in one place actually makes police investigations harder because they have to divert so much manpower into checking footage from every single camera.”

Public accessibility to these and other cameras can possibly mitigate the manpower problem and has several advantages:

- It frees police from a low skill task to concentrate on high skill ones.
- It enables thousands of interested citizens to take responsibility for their own safety.
- It encourages trust of government.
- It substantially increases the risks to the bad guys of being caught or identified.

Full Story

The Sandusky [Ohio] Register on June 24 published the names, ages and home counties of the almost 2,700 concealed carry permit holders in its circulation area. Ohio gun laws restrict public access to concealed carry records but allow the media to access them.

In retaliation - and to illustrate the ease of finding personal information when given a name - the BFA began printing personal information about Sandusky Register Managing Editor Matt Westerhold.

On its website, the group has printed Westerhold’s phone numbers, automobile records, traffic ticket record, the address of a home he owns and information about the mortgage on the property.

This is an interesting Open Records fight for several reasons:

1. Why should “media” have access to records that the public does not, as is the case under Ohio law? This smacks of elitism and brings to mind Nixon’s famous quote, “Trust me.”

2. The arguments for maintaining secrecy of concealed carry permit holders appear to be similar to the arguments made by AIDS infected individuals. Disclosure would be embarrassing.

Security concerns are commonly raised in Open Records cases. As a practical matter, the effect of Open Records on security appears to be minimal or positive. The most publicized security claim alleged for blocking Open Records was made to stop this WEB site from publicizing the names, addresses, and photos of members of the Sex Offender Registry.

The results of making the records public were so uniformly positive that as of last count, 36 states have made the release mandatory, and most make the information available for free on the Internet.

The Open Records Project has argued from its founding that public information encourages public trust in government and trust between fellow citizens.

3. Disclosure of the managing editor’s personal information would seem to be an interesting response. One might want to see his campaign contributions as well.
Full Story

A Detroit television reporter was able to confirm that the Kilpatrick Civic Fund, a nonprofit created by Detroit mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, paid the luxury La Costa Hotel and Spa $8,605.03 for two rooms for Kilpatrick, his wife and sons while the mayor, according to fund officials, was there fundraising for the group.

At the insistence of the mayor, police investigators in California have recommended felony charges against Channel 7 TV reporter Steve Wilson for obtaining Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s personal hotel and billing records by impersonating the mayor.

Mayor Kilpatrick has been involved in spending controversies throughout his administration. He is known for having his cash-strapped city pay $25,000 to lease his family a Lincoln Navigator. In May 2005, the Detroit Free Press reported that over the first 33 months of his term, Kilpatrick had charged over $210,000 on his city-issued credit card for travel, meals, and entertainment.

Time Magazine ranked him one of the three worst mayors in the country for 2005.
Full Story

A Scottish police officer has been accused of revealing confidential details about paedophile, Albert Hay, to a resident of the town where the man was living.

Gerard McCartney, 41, of Grampian Police, denied a charge brought under the Data Protection Act at Elgin Sheriff Court earlier this week.

Last July more than 200 people in Keith signed a petition urging Moray Council to remove Hay, 68, from a flat in the town’s Mar Court.

Britain and the EU have a different view of the relationship between government and citizens than America does. Through most of history Europe has been ruled by royalty. The royal subjects were taught to trust the benevolence of the monarch in a paternalistic system somewhat similar to that of a parent and child. The monarchies are gone, but the paternalism persists.

Some question if you can trust a government that secretly places a convicted pedophile in an apartment near children.
Full Story