FROM THE PUBLISHER | Transparency in Marion County, courtesy of Barry Wilkerson

But perhaps that makes this particularly timely. The prosecutor I’m saluting here is Barry Wilkerson, the Riley County attorney.

When Mr. Wilkerson was the president of the state association of prosecutors, he helped get a bill through the Legislature that extended the public’s access to important information. This was in 2014.

The information I’m referring to is what’s in an affidavit, a document in which the cops and/or prosecutor try to persuade a judge to give them a warrant to either search somebody’s home or office, or in fact to arrest them. One is a search warrant; the other is an arrest warrant. In Marion, the issue is the affidavit that they submitted to the judge to get the search warrant.

This will be key information: What rationale, what evidence, did the cops have that some sort of crime was being committed that somehow outweighed the constitutional and federal protections we give to journalists to let them do their jobs?

While I find it difficult to imagine anything that would legitimize the search, I think reasonable people could withhold judgment until they know what that affidavit says.

Prior to Mr. Wilkerson’s efforts, those affidavits were not open records. And so the public was left in the dark about why the authorities arrested somebody or even conducted a search – at least until the preliminary hearing, usually months later. The lack of disclosure leads to all sorts of rumors, and rumors lead to distrust and lying and bad decisions. Mr. Wilkerson experienced that first-hand in a case that involved the murder of one teenager by another a few years before.

Thing is, prosecutors and police and judges and newspaper publishers all have an interest in a better, safer community, and that starts with trust, which comes from facts, which comes from transparency. The only way we can truly trust the government, or the cops, or anybody else, for that matter, is to know that we can independently review what they’re doing.

As a matter of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that Mr. Wilkerson came to me to try to help bring the news media associations along in the compromise, so I guess I had a role. I was happy to do it, since it meant more openness. I’m sure there were compromises, although I don’t even remember what we gave up. Doesn’t matter much.

What matters is that you and I, and everybody else in the world, is pretty soon going to be able to see what rationale they had to go ransacking a newspaper. Without Mr. Wilkerson’s efforts, we’d be left with nothing but rumor, speculation and accusations.