[ OUR OPINION ]

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Court hearings shouldn’t
warrant ID checks

THE ISSUE Some driver's license revocation hearings are held in a state agency's lobby because of a security policy.

COURT proceedings are open to the public, which means just anyone can attend. The government has no need to know who "just anyone" is, but quasi-judicial officials are insisting that observers of driver's license revocation hearings in Hawaii show photo IDs and sign a log before entering the hearing room. They claim the privacy intrusion is based on security needs, but the practice is motivated more by Big Brother tendencies and should be abandoned.

The Administrative Driver's License Revocation Office's recalcitrance has created the absurd spectacle of hearings conducted in a corner of the agency's public lobby, instead of one of the three available hearing rooms, in cases where the defendant objects to the intrusive policy. The dispute is now before the state Supreme Court. If approved, the practice could spread throughout government, severely infringing on people's right to attend hearings without being placed on public record.

The issue arose nearly three years ago when Darcy Freitas, after being arrested for drunken driving, requested a hearing on whether his license should be revoked. A woman told a receptionist she wanted to attend the hearing but departed after being told she must show identification and sign in. To Freitas, that means he was being deprived of an open and fair hearing, his Sixth Amendment right.

Jacqueline Kaneshiro, the hearing officer, rejected his assertion, not surprisingly agreeing with Ronald Sakata, her boss and architect of the policy. Kaneshiro maintained that the privacy intrusion was necessary because the agency had been "subject to bomb threats, personal threats, angry letters, bullet holes through the windows that surround the office area, empty beer cans left in the perimeter of the office and angry calls from individuals and their family members, who have had their driver's license revoked." No one has ever disrupted a revocation hearing.

If the hearing rooms are such a danger zone, the agency should install metal detectors, in use at other state court buildings. The Supreme Court last June directed the agency to conduct a hearing on the issue, which Kaneshiro -- not surprisingly -- had denied.

At the hearing in July, retired Honolulu Police Chief Michael Nakamura testified that the taking of names and IDs is "not absolutely useless, (but) close to it" in deterring disruption. Sakata insists that the policy is effective.

The high court seems inclined to side with Sakata. In its ruling last June, Justice Simeon Acoba cited a 1983 federal appeals court decision that public access to courts "is not absolute" but can be limited "to keep order and dignity in the courtroom." That basis applies in the Freitas case, Acoba concluded.