Thanks to a Franklin County court magistrate’s decision this week, public boards in Ohio may be less tempted to try to dodge the state’s open meetings law.

This is good news for all of us who want to know how local school boards, city councils and other public bodies do business on our behalf.

Here’s the backstory:

Columbus City Schools is in hot water with the state for changing enrollment figures to make its students’ achievement test scores look better on the district’s report card. Under state law, the board can meet privately with its attorney if it faces “pending or imminent court action.” But the Columbus district doesn’t face a lawsuit, so it can’t use that exemption to the open meetings law.

Even so, last year as the “scrubbing” scandal unfolded, board members closed seven meetings to talk with their attorney….

Wow. Just imagine the possibilities for shutting you out of a meeting. All a public board would have to do is pay a lawyer to sit in….

Boards have any number of reasons for wanting to meet in secret. They may want to get their ducks in a row. They may want to duck questions. They may feel defensive or profoundly uncomfortable about discussing high-stakes situations in an open meeting.

Too bad.

State law gives them only five exceptions to the open-meetings rule, and in this case, the law comes down squarely against secrecy.

The (Canton) Repository

 

DeWine deserves credit for not letting rape kits go

In late 2011, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine asked the state’s law enforcement agencies to send him sexual assault evidence so it could be tested free of charge.

To date, more than 2,300 untested rape kits have arrived at a state crime lab, where technicians have started processing them.

If trends from early testing continue, roughly a third of the kits could match someone in state and national DNA databases, according to a Cleveland Plain Dealer analysis of data from the attorney general’s office.

That could mean a substantial number of criminal cases could be made against rapists, some of whom still may be at large.

DeWine put out the call for rape kits after he learned that one collected in 2009, but never sent for testing, contained evidence which was linked to serial killer Anthony Sowell.

Sowell, you recall, was convicted in July 2011 of murdering 11 women and dumping their remains around his Cleveland home….

Primarily because of testing costs and tight budgets, police are likely to submit a kit to the state’s crime lab for testing only when they have a strong suspect. Rape kits from weak cases may not be submitted for testing.

Across the state, about 2,000 kits are tested each year, but another 2,000 may go untested. Those are the ones DeWine sought for analysis to see if DNA matches could be made….

Officials say when all the submitted kits have been tested, there may be 850 potential cases resulting from the DNA matches.

DeWine deserves much credit for calling attention to the problem.

The (Findlay) Courier