Bangor Daily News Hits Fingerprint Law
"Lawmakers now have several choices," says the April 24 lead editorial in the
Bangor Daily News. "They can, and probably should, scrap the entire law, admit
that it was poorly considered, researched, and presented, and start from
scratch..."
The piece describes the history and current status of the fingerprint law.
"Rarely does something so grounded in good intentions become so swamped by
confusion and anger, or a question so clearly in need of facts get hunches
for an answer. Never should a matter as important as protecting children
from sexual abuse be treated this haphazardly.
The bungling started four years ago, when this law was passed."
The article traces the development of anger over the law from perception of it as
unfunded mandate that was handled poorly to questions of civil liberties.
"So from that sorry start as an issue of pocketbooks and inconvenience, Maine
soon found itself in a full-blown civil liberties battle. As protests grew,
the important questions -- whatever happened to the presumption of innocence,
what background information would be gathered and how would it be used and kept
confidential, where was credible evidence that school employees are anything
more than a very small part of the entire child abuse problem -- were brushed
aside with assertions that the need for this program was far to urgent to be
delayed."
That argument, says the writer, is invalidated by the years that have already
passed between enactment and implementation. Details of the history of the
last week before the April break, specifically the shifts in support for the new
hires amendment and the announcement from
the State Police that the FBI would not participate in a program that
checks the backgrounds of certain employees only at the discretion of the
employer, lead to the statement given by the FBI to MEAF.
The State Police, we are told, will have an FBI
spokesmen available to lawmakers this week. [MEAF has already supplied legislators
with names of our contacts.]
"So, as if financing, fairness, civil liberties, and the baffling question of
how best to protect children at school, home, and anywhere in between weren't
enough to deal with, lawmakers now have conflicting FBI spokesmen on their
hands. Three months of wrestling and it's only gotten worse. Amazing."
Giving the preferred option as scrapping the current law and starting over,
the editorial concludes, "...They can, once they get definitive information from
the FBI, proceed with the new hires compromise. They can, of course, do nothing,
let the amendments and revisions die and allow this four-year-old piece of
flawed legislation to take effect and let a future Legislature deal with the
consequences. Which is how this Legislature got into this mess in the first
place."
The editorial is worth reading in its entirety.
Don Tarbet