On Point: Hardly ever bad

Published February 22, 2006 at midnight

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Imagine if the Bush administration defended its notorious treatment of Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen held in solitary for more than three years before charges were grudgingly filed, by saying, "Sure we've deprived him of his freedom without due process of law, but we don't do this sort of thing very often."

Such an admission would be true but contemptible. Government doesn't get good grades for respecting the constitutional rights of most of us. We expect it to observe the rights of all of us. Yet local governments now defending the condemnation of property for commercial development frequently offer the "most of us" excuse.

An attorney for the Denver Urban Renewal Authority made such an argument this week before a state Senate committee considering whether to restrict the use of eminent domain. It's rare for DURA to condemn property against the owner's will, he said. Extremely rare.

Meanwhile, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League made much the same claim in a column published in this paper: Eminent domain is "hardly ever used for redevelopment purposes," he wrote.

It turns out that "hardly ever" means six times in the past seven years in this state, according to the municipal league's count. And while that number might appear remarkably low, let's not quarrel with it here. The better question is whether we should feel reassured that local government is taking land on behalf of private parties only once a year or so, when the Fifth Amendment condones the taking of private property only "for public use."

How often is it acceptable to deprive property owners of what clearly was meant to be - however obtuse the U.S. Supreme Court might be on the subject - a fundamental constitutional right?

Avoiding a set-up

Let's say you accidentally rear-end another vehicle and the driver sues you for personal injuries. Wouldn't it be only fair for you to know whether that person had sought treatment for similar or even identical problems within the past few years?

What if the plaintiff claimed his post-accident mental state jeopardized future enjoyment of life when in fact he'd been seeing therapists off and on for years? Might that not shed light on his claim?

In recent decisions, the Colorado Supreme Court seems to be closing off access to medical records in personal injury cases. It has declared, for example, that "relevance alone cannot be the test" for waiving the physician-patient privilege and that a record of treatment offering "possible alternate" explanations for a patient's condition may not be open to pretrial discovery.

This ominous tilt of the legal playing field has a simple remedy in the form of House Bill 1205, which is scheduled for a hearing Thursday in the Judiciary Committee. The bill says anyone asserting a personal injury claim waives the privacy of medical records during the discovery process. How else can a defendant know if she's being set up?

Manual closing out of left field

The Denver School Board has excellent reasons to close Manual High School, but board member Jill Conrad was right to vote against it last week and thus become the lone dissenter.

The board discarded a radical plan for restructuring Manual for an even more drastic remedy - but without any hint beforehand that such an alternative was in the wind. No matter how crummy a school, students and teachers shouldn't have to hear about its death sentence on the nightly news.

Foxes in the henhouse

If we're going to let a business owned by United Arab Emirates operate six of our major ports, why stop there? Why not put the Saudis in charge of airport security and the Colombians or Bolivians in charge of the war on drugs?

Can't we find a state-owned company from Mexico to take over our Border Patrol?

Surely the Chinese should be invited to bid on the next contract to run Los Alamos National Laboratory, while Iran boasts unique credentials to preside over the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Finally, isn't it time for the nations of the world to elevate Sudan to the U.N. Human Rights Commission?

Oh, wait: That outpost of genocidal barbarism is already there.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

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