COMMENTARY

LYNNE LARKIN

A glass of milk breaks in the kitchen while the two and three-year-olds are playing. One of two things happens. Either they all stand and take the blame, or perhaps more likely finger-pointing begins. Avoiding guilt: Nature or Nurture? Whichever causes the instinct to lie, it starts young. The apocryphal “cherry tree” admission of culpability is only to be dreamed of by good parents everywhere.

If this tendency toward lying faded with childhood, we wouldn’t need our system of justice. The guilty would admit their errors, and the truth would come out. But life is not so easy. Whether it’s a father’s discovery that just one child has milk on his hands, or whether it’s Sherlock Holmes seeing the whole story in a simple muddy footprint, there is the need to gather evidence assess and weigh it in order to sift the wheat from the chaff.

Thus the very important power of discovery, a term in the law meaning allowing one party to access the evidence held by the other party, was born in English law. If this sounds boring, it’s not. It’s the meat of our justice system.

Stifle that yawn, all ye who wish the rule of law to prevail. When it affects you, you’ll not want a “kangaroo” court, or a “show trial.” That’s for the undemocratic states. In America, we expect much more.

Would we know that the Council of Indian River Shores had intended to pull the wool over our eyes if someone hadn’t been able to discover their emails? There doesn’t seem to be a George Washington among them, so when they agreed among themselves to conceal the nature of a meeting, and hide that meeting in the early hours of the morning, their intent was not to then confess their deeds. The truth was found in their writings.

Would we know that the County Commission is wholly, if not completely, supported by the dollars of big developers who want residential rentals to continue? Or that those developers are also in the pockets of the Sell-the-City-Utility crowd? Putting one and one [million] together would not be so easy without our ability, and the ability of good news reporters, to discover.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, both in political life and in the courts, parties will still try to hide that evidence, or to obfuscate it with false evidence of their own. Unless those people entrusted with oversight of disputes are willing to enforce the laws, the public loses its chance to right the ship when it sails off course.

Such course corrections are needed when a city or county clerk might “lose” emails or documents that damage their bosses. The State Department of Justice, or the Ethics Commission, should step in. When a party to a lawsuit claims all of their computers crashed, shrugs their shoulders and says, “Gosh, all the correspondence between co-conspirators is simply lost,” a judge should not allow such fraud. In either instance, hard drives can be searched, servers carry ghost versions of emails for years, etc. What if the State officials take sides and only enforce on behalf their favored party? What if a judge refuses to order access to the computers or servers and the truth remains hidden? [Note: This is not speculation. When faced with just such a bogus claim by a defendant, one judge in Indian River County who did business with that defendant refused to force production of the pertinent emails, some of which were shown as received by other witnesses. That judge stated in court, “You have to prove to me that the documents exist before I order access to the documents.” And no, his name isn’t Yossarian.]

Will the County Commission tell everyone why they are trying to ruin the City of Vero Beach? Will the Town of Indian River Shores let us in on why they think suing the City will get them lower rates?

Not likely.

Will a judge allow IR Shores and the County to avoid producing the documents that are relevant to their attacks on the City? We’ll see.

But thank our lucky stars that there are tools available in either case to reach back, read in, and really discern the truth. Let’s hope that the State officials, and the judges, do what’s right. It’s not just spilled milk, it’s the clean-up of much bigger messes, the depth of which we have yet to discover.