Opinion: Another viewpoint: AG needs to step up in public record case

This isn’t about a sexual predator being allowed to run loose in our schools for many years.

Gary Gregor moved from Utah to Santa Fe to McCurdy Charter School to Los Alamos to Española. He cut a wide swath through leaving a trail of broken children. His many sordid actions and subsequent investigations revealed Gregor had co-conspirators in some schools and administrators willing to look the other way, ignore his penchant for little girls and allow him to move from district to district with impunity.

This isn’t about the lack of investigation and prosecution on the part of several different law enforcement agencies from 2009 to 2017 that left so many more little girls exposed to Gregor’s lascivious actions. It wasn’t until parents started filing civil suits against school districts that law enforcement became interested in Gregor.

This is about how after many millions of dollars later in settlements, Gregor believes he has some rights to keep secret public records regarding his behavior.

This is about a judge giving a defense attorney, with no standing in the records fight, the ability to redact certain public information and asking the attorney general to give it his stamp of approval.

As Gregor faces criminal charges for his alleged sexual abuse of several children in several schools, his attorney, public defender Shelby Bradley, argues Gregor can’t get a fair trial if certain public records are released to media.

He first asked District Judge Sarah Singleton to order state Attorney General Hector Balderas to delay releasing public documents to the Santa Fe New Mexican. Balderas’ Office already stated the records are public.

Bradley then argued Gregor has a constitutional right to a fair trial and that trumps the state’s records law.

Singleton asked Bradley to redact information from public records that he believes will rob his client of a fair trial. She said if Balderas’ Office doesn’t agree with the redactions, she will decide on whether the redactions stand on a case-by-case basis.

No judge should allow any lawyer to do this, but especially one trying to manipulate the process in favor of his client. Also, no judge gets to decide redactions of a public record if they are outside the eight exceptions listed in the Act.

We assume no exceptions apply to Bradley’s desired redactions because Balderas has already stated the records are public.

Something that Singleton and Bradley aren’t considering is the many civil settlements and the voluminous amount of information that has been written about in newspapers and television coverage each time a school district pays a victim’s family. The Rio Grande Sun has hundreds of pages of information about Gregor’s alleged sexual exploits in the Española School District.

Also the Rio Grande Sun has almost all of the requested records and has written extensively about the content. It’s public record in more ways than a simple original record of entry.

We have no idea how much information the Santa Fe New Mexican has on Gregor’s time in that school district. However, that publication and ours has written much about each settlement, the details of the accusations and the actions of the district(s).

This bell can’t be unrung. Gregor is stuck with a public knowing his actions, albeit too late to stop him from further offending.

Balderas needs to step up and flex his muscles here. He is the attorney general, defender of the public’s access to records and public processes. There is no stronger situation than one in which a man’s actions need to be recounted to the public. Sexual predators, moving from school to school, must be covered by media to the fullest extent possible. That includes documents that may (or may not) hurt him in a criminal proceeding.

— Rio Grande Sun