Six years ago, then-Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a moderate Republican, earned a New England Muzzle Award — then hosted by GBH News — for proposing a change in the public-records laws so that access to birth, death and marriage records would not be available to the public for many decades. The delay would have amounted to 90 years in the case of birth and marriage records and 50 years after a person’s death.
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Fortunately, the bill didn’t pass. But now Baker’s successor, Gov. Maura Healey, a liberal Democrat, is back with a similar bill. As The Boston Globe put it in an editorial (sub. req.) on Thursday:
In a state that already has a dreadful reputation for its lack of transparency and will probably face a ballot question over the exemptions from the state’s public records law accorded the governor’s office and the Legislature, this is simply the wrong law at the wrong time.
The Globe observes that Healey, in her announcement touting the legislation, emphasizes one of its few positive aspects — the end of references to “out of wedlock” on birth and marriage certificates. The rest of it, though, would deprive researchers of information they need to do their work in areas such as public health and genealogy. And she has stacked the deck in favor of passage by making it part of a budget bill that must be approved and for which debate is limited.
As I wrote in 2020, these records have been freely available to anyone who asks for them since the early Puritan era. Investigative reporter Jenifer McKim of GBH News said on Twitter at the time: “As MA governor [Baker] works to make birth, death records secret, thinking of the stories I’ve written and produced with the help of these key, currently public, documents, including suicides at colleges and universities.”
And in a 2020 interview with the Chelsea Record, Ryan Woods, executive vice president of the New England and Genealogical Society, said, “Unequivocally it was a surprise to us. There had not been any public discussion about this until it appeared in the budget.”
This is not Gov. Healey’s first time around with the Muzzle Awards. In 2015, when she was the state attorney general, I singled her out for defending a 1946 state law that criminalized political lies aimed at influencing an election, as if that were even theoretically possible.
In 2018, also a time when she was AG, she won another Muzzle, this one for upholding rulings that public information should, in some cases, remain private. Then-Globe reporter Todd Wallack, now with The Washington Post, documented a number of Healey’s attempts to suppress public records. His most startling finding: Healey’s office had upheld a ruling by the Worcester district attorney that records pertaining to the 1951 murder of a state trooper should not be made public. Healey’s decision reversed a ruling by Secretary of State Bill Galvin’s office and denied a friend of the murder victim the opportunity to follow up some leads on his own. The friend had since died.
Massachusetts has one of the worst reputations in the country with regard to public records. All too often, Maura Healey has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution.