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It is not for me to call on Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone to resign. He was elected by the residents of that county, and if they want him out of office, they can recall him, or if he stays in office until 2002, they can elect someone else to the position. That's how democracy works.
But I sure can't blame some Jefferson County residents for hoping that Stone will decide to take up another line of work soon.
The most recent reason emerged last week when Stone asked a federal court to decide who owns the copyright to certain videotapes related to the April 20 massacre at Columbine High School in Jefferson County.
There are two sets of tapes at issue. One set comes from surveillance cameras in the high school, and the other comprises three videos made by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris before they killed a teacher and a dozen students.
Those three video tapes were seized by the sheriff's department when it was investigating the murders, and would doubtless have served as evidence in a criminal trial.
Since the two boys ended their rampage by killing themselves, there won't be such a trial. If there had been, and the tapes had been entered as evidence, then they would have become part of the trial record, which is normally open to the public.
(I say normally,
because in this case other
information that is normally public, such as autopsy
reports, has been deliberately covered up.)
But there's no trial, and Stone still has those tapes -- the ones that he allowed a reporter from Time to watch late last year, thereby igniting yet another barrage of criticism.
Back then, I wondered why Stone still had the tapes. They were evidence in an investigation, and he had announced the investigation was pretty much done, and all they had to do was write the report.
So I called Chaffee County Judge Bill Alderton, a former prosecuting attorney, and asked him what the law said about those tapes.
It's pretty clear what should happen to the
tapes,
Alderton said. They were taken as evidence,
and once the investigation or trial is over -- in this
case, the investigation since Klebold and Harris are beyond
the reach of justice -- then the tapes, like any other
property, are supposed to be returned to their
owner.
But the owners are dead, I pointed out.
Assuming that they died intestate (without leaving a
will),
Alderton said, then the property goes to
their heirs. The Colorado rule on inheritance is first the
children of the deceased -- and there aren't any that we
know of here -- and then the parents. So the sheriff, as
soon as he's concluded his investigation, can follow the
law by returning the tapes to the Klebold and Harris
parents, and they could burn them or sell them or do
whatever they wanted to the tapes. The tapes are their
property.
I mentioned that there are civil suits pending against the Harris and Klebold families, and if they were in possession of the tapes, then there would be motions for injunctions and the like to restrict distribution or prohibit destruction of the tapes.
That's a pretty safe prediction,
he said, but
that's not the sheriff's worry. His legal obligation is to
return the property to its rightful owner.
So Stone could have just followed the normal procedure for returning evidence, rather than going go federal court.
As for the school surveillance tapes, he says there's a copyright issue that needs to be resolved, since there have been many requests to view them under the state open-records law.
Let's see. These tapes were made with tax dollars in a building constructed and operated with public funds. If they're not public property, it's hard to imagine what would be.
But that's just the citizen in me talking. As a free-lance writer, I'm rather pleased that Sheriff Stone wants to start enforcing the federal copyright laws.
Normally, if somebody pirates a column or something else I write, it's up to me to find a lawyer and bring action for copyright infringement -- a process so involved and expensive that it never happens.
If Sheriff Stone is serious about this, he should open a
piracy hot line
for reports of copyright violation,
and then pursue the cases aggressively. Then he'd become a
hero to the free-lance writers of America, and he'd have
defenders -- instead of all those critics who keep
questioning his judgment.
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