TALLAHASSEE - A parade of editors, broadcasters and media attorneys on Wednesday urged a Florida panel looking at privacy and court records to make no distinction between records on paper and records online.
"Putting them online opens them to even more people, which I think is only good," Kate Marymont, executive editor of the News-Press in Fort Myers, told the Supreme Court Committee on Privacy and Court Records.
"I think the more open, the better," she said.
Marymont and other journalists gave examples of investigative journalism that were made possible by electronic records.
Marymont's paper recently reported that 34 area school bus drivers had suspended licenses.
"If we had to pull the drivers' licenses of 710 bus drivers by hand, we might not have done that story," she said. "... Electronic access to information meant that drivers were taken off of school buses.
"I can't prove that we saved lives, but I do believe our children are safer."
But an advocate for victims of domestic violence urged the committee to move cautiously.
"In many instances, privacy equals safety and can mean the difference between life and death," said Margaret Pearce of the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
She said abusers have used public records to find and hurt their victims.
"We must not make it easy for abusers from the privacy of their own home and a simple Internet connection to track down and even kill their victims," she said.
The 15-member panel of judges, attorneys, law professors and court clerks was created a year ago when Florida's high court issued a moratorium on posting court records on the Internet until a policy is developed to safeguard privacy. Documents that have been screened or are judged to be of "significant public interest" were exceptions to the ban.
