State will continue electronic distribution of data about the case

By Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News
August 10, 2004

The judge in the Kobe Bryant rape case won't halt electronic distribution of information by the state about the proceedings, despite several instances in which the alleged victim's name has inadvertently been made public.

A request that the judge do so had been made last month by John Clune, the attorney representing the 20-year-old Eagle woman and her family.

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In a ruling issued Friday and made public Monday, Chief District Judge Terry Ruckriegle said Clune's suggestion that officials return to their standard practice of requiring people to appear in person at the court clerk's office to request public-case documents would place too great a burden on Eagle County's limited resources.

The court administrator for the Fifth Judicial District - which includes Eagle County - has determined that "the loss of electronic distribution of public information in this case would result in having to hire and train 10 new employees at the Eagle courthouse, along with the attendant leasing of computers, office equipment, office space, and additional copy machines necessary for these persons," Ruckriegle's ruling stated.

Ruckriegle's order also noted that the Web site maintained on the case by the Colorado Judicial Branch has averaged 15,674 requests per month for document downloading between Sept. 1, 2003, and July 26 of this year. That's an average of 712 requests per business day.

"For a small courthouse with a docket crowded with other matters that also require the clerks' attention, there is simply no way that the current personnel can handle 712 document requests per day," Ruckriegle's order said.

On three occasions, court personnel have made errors which have compromised the alleged victim's privacy in the Bryant case.

On Sept. 16, a case document was posted on the state's Bryant site in which the victim's name had not been blacked out, making it available in cyberspace to anyone who viewed the document for about an hour, before the mistake was detected.

On June 24, a court reporter mistakenly sent a 206-page transcript from a closed "rape shield" hearing to seven news organizations.

Ruckriegle issued an order the same day forbidding the publication of the document, but after a legal battle that reached as high as the U.S. Supreme Court, a censored version of a 75-page portion of that transcript was publicly released on Aug. 2.

And, on July 28, yet another document - with the alleged victim's name again not blacked out - was posted on the state Web site, prompting Ruckriegle to issue an apology to the young woman and her parents during a pretrial hearing July 30.

Clune, the alleged victim's lawyer, labeled the most recent mistake as "inconceivable," coming so closely on the heels of a July 19 hearing in which he told the judge how the two previous errors had badly shaken his client's faith in the judicial system.

In rejecting Clune's request to shut down the Web site, Ruckriegle wrote that he "recognizes the gravity of these events and deeply regrets their occurrence," but said his preferred solution is to focus on efforts to reduce "human error" in the processing of case documents.

Ruckriegle's ruling comes quickly on the heels of his order issued Wednesday in which he issued his toughest ban to date on public comments outside court by all participants in the case.

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