Opinion: Hamilton County Clerk of Courts should reverse policy, restore deleted records

Here’s a hard truth: Ultra-liberal San Francisco now prioritizes public safety more than Hamilton County.

Recently, that city’s voters recalled their district attorney after years of spiraling gun violence, homelessness and open-air drug dealing in their city’s central business district. Turns out a soft-on-crime approach encourages crime. Who knew?

Here in the Queen City, we face similar levels of dysfunction and despair.

While our tough-but-fair county prosecutor fights the good fight, many of our judges continue to put their politics over public safety. We see the headlines with depressing regularity: Repeat offenders repeatedly offending, many while out of jail on low bonds or lenient sentences.

Now more than ever, we need an open and transparent courthouse so we can hold those people accountable. Yet our newly-appointed Clerk of Courts Pavan Parikh has gone the other direction. He has allowed his radical politics to infect every aspect of his job – right down to which records he will let the public see.

As this newspaper reported on May 24, Mr. Parikh unilaterally scrubbed thousands of municipal court records from the Clerk of Courts website at the request of local housing activists. For the first time in Hamilton County history, a public official has taken the intentional step of making his office less transparent – and has done so in the interest of advancing his own personal cause.

And we would be kidding ourselves if we think he is going to stop here.

Will Mr. Parikh next restrict public access to his colleagues’ unpopular bond and sentencing decisions? This is by no means a stretch. As this newspaper reported on December 29, Mr. Parikh made his top priority known within moments after his appointment: "We need to make sure all of our judges get elected." To be clear: "Our" means "Democrat." Now that partisan politics has entered the equation, there is no telling which records he will purge next.

This is not the first time Mr. Parikh has let ideology obscure his duties. Within months of his appointment, Hamilton County Municipal Court judges were forced to overturn the onerous and illegal requirements he placed on police officers seeking warrants. His office has even been sued in federal court for failing to provide timely access to records by a media outlet.

None of this should come as any surprise. Concerned citizens across the political spectrum have been increasingly disgusted by the less-than-transparent shenanigans of many local Democrats. Several of Mr. Parikh’s courthouse colleagues (and 2020 judicial slatemates) received campaign dollars from "super PAC" run by personal injury attorney Blake Maislin – an organization currently under investigation by the Ohio Elections Commission for alleged campaign finance violations. And then there is the Rosetta Stone of all local political scandals – City Hall’s "Gang of Five" fiasco – in which left-leaning elected officials held secret meetings via text.

In the battle between politics and transparency, politics always seems to win.

Our right to know what happens in our government offices is central to our democracy – so central, in fact, that it is enshrined in our Constitution. Yet the Clerk’s website now leaves the false impression that thousands of court proceedings never happened. I’m sure some of these cases involved sympathetic parties. But we can’t allow one person to unilaterally decide what the public can and cannot see from their government.

Mr. Parikh’s pathetic defense is that "paper" version of the deleted records exist somewhere in a Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse. But, of course, based upon what you see on his website, there is no way to know you should look for them. And it seems unfair, in this era of five-dollar-per-gallon gasoline, to force taxpayers to drive downtown and pay to park when a functional website already exists.

At this point, the Clerk’s Office seems almost hostile to Ohio’s open records laws. Under his administration, the taxpayers who fund the courthouse will see what Mr. Parikh wants them to see – and nothing more. This policy fundamentally undermines the public’s right to know – and, thus, democracy itself.

If the public is to hold the courthouse accountable for it actions, it needs complete records of all court proceedings, from small claims court to murder trials. I call upon Mr. Parikh to reverse this policy and to publicly pledge he will delete no further public records from the Clerk's website. I can’t believe I am requesting such a thing in 2022, but such are the times in which we live.

These are public records of public proceedings. We have an absolute right to see them, regardless of whether they comport with the Clerk’s personal political beliefs.

Steve Goodin is a former member of Cincinnati City Council and has served as an assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor and an Army officer. He is a partner at Graydon Law and a candidate for the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts office in the November 8 General Election.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Opinion: Hamilton County Clerk of Courts should reverse policy