ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

They have a lot to hide. Recent reports from the , the not-for-profit legal aid group and a group of law professors at have been critical of the way justice is administered in many of the courts.

Now comes , a nonprofit organization studying local government consolidation, with a study showing that many courts fall short of the transparency required by the Sunshine Law. The group encountered vast differences in time and cost for municipalities to provide public records, an important responsibility of local governments.

In last Sunday’s Post-Dispatch, reporters Jeremy Kohler, Jennifer S. Mann and Stephen Deere named names in disclosing some of the back-scratching that goes on between lawyers who operate in municipal courts. The article showed many local court officials misuse the Sunshine Law to keep their operations secret.

And little wonder, given the ticket-fixing, favor-trading and deal-making that go on, usually to the financial benefit of members of the court cabal and often at the expense of public safety.

Attorneys generally contend that they conceal the information to protect the privacy of the defendants. Please. The secrecy shields lawyers, prosecutors and judges who participate in a multimillion-dollar industry fueled by fees and fines paid disproportionately by the poor.

A portion of the millions of dollars collected goes into municipal budgets in some of St. Louis’ 90 municipalities, accounting for as much as 40 percent or more of the annual revenue in some of the towns. A huge chunk of the money keeps the machinery oiled, paying lawyers’ fees and the salaries of court officials.

Using the Sunshine Law to cloak court activities is directly contrary to the intent of the law. Its language is clear: “It is the public policy of this state that meetings, records, votes, actions, and deliberations of public governmental bodies be open to the public unless otherwise provided by law.�

Moreover, there is a vast body of law that says judicial proceedings in the United States must be open unless there are compelling reasons to close them.

The reporters were blocked at nearly every turn in their efforts to get information about traffic cases heard in county municipal courts. One goal was to determine which attorneys were getting the most favorable deals, and they wrote that their investigation “found a pervasive lack of transparency� in which “court hearings are conducted in assembly-line fashion and in hushed tones, without any way for the public to learn what is happening with each case.�

This is not to say that all traffic cases are bogus. They aren’t. But the DOJ report that detailed years of civil rights violations by the city of Ferguson against its citizens, and the other reports, throw them all into question.

So does the attempt by court officials to play hide the records.

The officials repeatedly refused to release information about cases that have been dismissed, saying they were required under a provision of the Sunshine Law to seal such cases. The law actually requires that cases be sealed only when there has been an arrest, which does not apply to most traffic violations.

Brendan Roediger, a St. Louis University law professor who is suing seven municipalities for allegedly charging illegal fees in their courts, said all the officials would need to do to protect the defendants’ privacy is to redact the names.

Drawing a line through the names with a black marker is all it would take.

Instead, when asked for records, court officials revved into high gear. They refused to supply even the basic court dockets, a list of cases scheduled for any given court session, something routinely made public in every other court.

The Clayton law firm Curtis, Heinz, Garrett & O’Keefe, whose attorneys are judges, prosecutors or city attorneys in more than 20 St. Louis County municipalities, sent the reporters’ request to the Regional Justice Information Service.

That service, which coordinates a regional database of criminal information including electronic records for about 50 area municipal courts, charged excessive fees for the reports it issued, took nearly a month to provide the reports and gave one report that was blank and others that had not been requested.

When Sam Alton — prosecutor in Olivette, city attorney in Pagedale and judge in Edmundson — got wind of the reporters’ requests, he sent an email to 64 court officials and attorneys recommending that they withhold information from the newspaper because some of the requests were “repetitive� and created “an undue burden� on the courts.

If open government is an undue burden, justice is in jeopardy. Even the Department of Justice couldn’t get the information it sought in Ferguson regarding ticket-fixing. It had to rely on emails among the mayor, judge, court clerk, police chief, collector of revenue and others.

The Supreme Court rules say court records are presumed open and should be provided at a reasonable cost. The Sunshine Law says the same thing.

It’s clear that the cabal doesn’t want to open the case files because they don’t want the gravy train to stop. A lot of lawyers have made a good living off municipal court work and want to continue to do so, no matter that some of those courts and some of those attorneys have been violating the civil rights of St. Louisans for decades.

Consider the attitude of Stephanie Karr, Ferguson’s prosecuting attorney. In an email cited in the DOJ report, she admitting dismissed all red-light camera tickets for defendants who’d hired attorneys, unless “the attorney goes off on all the constitutional stuff.� In those cases, she makes the attorneys come to court, argue and pay a fine. Cite the Constitution, get hassled.

This must stop, and that job falls to the Missouri Supreme Court, which should be fully supported in the effort by the Missouri Bar. The Supreme Court proved it could do so when it removed ticket-fixing, back-tax-owing Ferguson Judge Ronald Brockmeyer and transferred all Ferguson Municipal Court cases to the St. Louis County Court.

The Supreme Court should appoint a special master to implement and enforce the same rules in municipal courts that are in place in the state’s circuit courts. By law, municipal courts are divisions of circuit courts. They’re the only place where most Missourians ever encounter the justice system. Too many of them are an embarrassment.