By Stephanie Ramage

Spring evenings in Athens resonate with an unearthly beauty that drags students from their work. Or maybe that’s just the way I remember the April evening in 1992 when I was working at the independent student newspaper, the Red & Black, though almost everyone else had left. The phone rang. I answered it and a male voice said something like, “The Athens police found a body behind the Manse House,” before hanging up.

I looked around the newsroom. For the life of me, I can’t remember who was there with me. I’ve tried a million times. Was it Michael Giarrusso? Unlikely. If Michael had been there it would have been him, and not me, who ended up reporting the story of the murder of Jennifer Stone. The same would have been true of Russ Bynum. It would have been him. Not me. Anyone but me, really.

But I was the only reporter there, and that is how Stephanie (Ramage) Baker ended up being the first reporter on the scene of the murder of the University of Georgia student. There wasn’t much going on. I suppose I could have snapped a photo of the crime scene tape with my Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication-issued Pentax camera and taken off, but I stayed. I stayed, though I was so intimidated by the impromptu assignment that I was shaking in my Guadalcanal Diary T-shirt and spandex leggings.

I stayed because I could hear my media law professor, Wally Eberhard, emphatically saying over and over again, “People have a right to know what’s going on in their community.”  So I gathered enough courage to ask one of the policemen if there was a body behind the house. He said no, that the area of investigation was actually an apartment on the back side of the house. That’s about all he said.

The television crews arrived, and by the time the Red & Black rolled off the press, the story had broken elsewhere.

 In her photo on the television news, Jennifer Stone was a beautiful brunette. I knew nothing else about her, but in the days that followed, I would get to know her through the eyes of the people who loved her. I interviewed Jennifer’s friends, classmates and family. I felt the weight of their grief and the fear that gripped the town. UGA students and Athens townsfolk were afraid a serial killer was on the loose.

A little more than a month later, when I graduated from UGA, the Jennifer Stone case had not been solved. Her rape. Her murder. These crimes were brutal gashes across the community. The emptiness that her killing had left, the hole in the world, as her boyfriend had described it, stretched on and on over the years.

For 16 years, the case has not been solved. No suspect has ever been identified.

Occasionally, reporters will look back into such cases. That is often the thing that keeps the pressure on investigators to do their jobs. Such unsolved murder stories are sometimes the catalysts for witnesses coming forward with new information. In 2005, the Athens Banner-Herald tried to do such a story. The paper’s reporters asked the Athens-Clark County Police for the Jennifer Stone investigation records under the Georgia Open Records Act. The police refused to hand over the records. They claimed the Stone case was an ongoing investigation, even after 13 years, because investigators might be able to solve it at some point through DNA evidence. A legal battle ensued.

Last week, four of Georgia’s Supreme Court judges agreed with the police, and in doing so they have dealt a crippling blow to the right of all citizens to know what is going on in their communities. We have a right to know how an investigation has been handled—especially when the investigation has dragged on for such a long time. By siding with the police, the court has effectively handed police investigators in Georgia a convenient excuse for not doing their jobs. Sloppy investigation? If the police never close it, no one will ever know.

That’s right. Under the court’s 4-3 ruling, a police investigation remains pending until it is officially closed, and until then, it is not open to the public.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines  “pending” as “remaining undecided.” With that in mind, can you imagine how many bungled or unscrupulous investigations will get hidden behind the Georgia Supreme Court’s ruling? The court tried to clear that up by saying that an investigation is closed when all litigation related to it is settled. When is that? Litigation related to some criminal cases drags on for decades. Some is never settled. Furthermore, with our ability to store DNA evidence comes an open-ended investigation period for nearly every crime that involves bodily harm. As long as someone may yet be charged, the investigation will remain pending. Where is the motivation for police investigators to bring a difficult investigation to a close when they can more easily cover their blunders if they call it  “pending”?

In a democracy, it is imperative that the courts refuse to allow the law to be distorted in such a way that it gives cover to those who would abuse their power as law enforcement officers. Police officers have guns, they have the authority to arrest us, and now the Georgia Supreme Court has given them the power to cover their tracks simply by applying the label “pending” to a criminal investigation.

Presiding Justice Carol W. Hunstein disagreed with the majority of her fellow judges. Under their interpretation of the open records law, she wrote, “only official closure of the file by the government authority in charge of the investigation can authorize access of the investigation information to the public.”

I read those words and I felt a terrible chill. Those words should never describe a court decision in a free country. SP
Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.