In 2006, a special legislative committee began talking about the circumstances under which courts should erase criminal records. After three meetings the committee didn't reach consensus, and Chairman Robin Vos, R-Caledonia, disbanded it in May 2007.

In a letter to the committee he said he would introduce some committee ideas as legislation, but what he has produced in this young year is a thoroughly bad bill now circulating in the Legislature for co-sponsors.

The bill would require cases to be removed from the state's court Web site (known as CCAP) if the cases were dismissed, if the defendants were found not guilty, or if an appellate court overturned a circuit court decision and the case was dismissed. This would apply to felonies, misdemeanors, and civil cases in which there was a forfeiture.

The reason we have open courts and public records is to promote citizen knowledge of the democracy, citizen participation in it, and citizen awareness of the course of justice. \Although it may at first seem to protect innocent people from being trailed by unfounded accusations, the bill actually makes it harder for the public to know what is happening in society, and that cannot be allowed.

In the committee meeting minutes there is an expressed concern that people may be discriminated against for jobs or housing if cases remain available after they have been dismissed or the defendants found not guilty. That is a valid concern, but it cannot trump the general need for public access to records. And of course the bill does not affect records in courthouses; it merely prevents easy access via the Internet.

Dismissal or a finding of not guilty also does not equal innocence. Sexual assaults can be difficult to prosecute given the intimate circumstances in which they occur. Someone with a skilled lawyer may escape a traffic or murder charge because of sloppy police work. An old case sent back from an appellate court may be dismissed because witnesses have moved, their memories have faded, or evidence was lost.

For an era when community was defined by the distance a horse could trot in a couple of hours, maintaining records only in a courthouse was fine. Today it isn't. The speed and extent of our transportation network means people can move from Racine to Hudson or from Green Bay to Racine quickly and with little trouble. How then do we monitor our society in an era when community can span a continent? We depend on the Internet, our modern courthouse analog.

Wouldn't it be useful to a single woman to know that her date has a history of sexual assaults accusations elsewhere in the state? Would a citizen not be interested in knowing that several felony charges against a state senator were dismissed before he was convicted of a misdemeanor? And realize that these are not vague suspicions but cases in which attorneys have considered the evidence and decided that it is strong enough to warrant charges and a trial.

The state court Web site does not contain the important details which explain why a case developed as it did, but there is already a notice warning people that the information is basic. And that's where it ends, with trust. We trust citizens to discern what is proper and what isn't, and what may represent a pattern of misconduct. Politicians are presently asserting that people can be trusted to spend their own money wisely and to make their own health care decisions. It follows that people are also capable of looking at court information and deciding whether it is fair and useful.