Jorge Morales had every reason to feel blessed on that quiet May night. He'd become a father just the day before and was excited about his wife and newborn coming home. He also had the love of his 5-year-old stepdaughter, Dalia, whom he was taking for an evening walk in the Allapattah section of Miami after eating at McDonald's.

That's when Morales was shot dead. 'I remember he said, `Run, honey run!' and grabbed me and took me to the ground,' '' Dalia Roman recalled. ``I remember he was covered with blood. I was covered with blood. I was crying and kicking and screaming when they took me away.''

Morales was struck in the head by one of 59 bullets fired by two cops that night. Two bullets entered the spine of an alleged robber running from the police. The other 56 ended up inside nearby homes, cars, fence gates, the McDonald's. At least one other bystander was wounded. ''They shot everywhere. They didn't care,'' a witness said of the cops.

How did The Herald come to know all this? Because of freedom of information laws that enable the public to access even the most sensitive documents of public agencies and governments, in this case ballistics reports prepared by internal investigators.

And it mattered.

The newspaper's investigation into what was then a trigger-happy Miami Police Department responsible for numerous deliberate and accidental killings and injuries provided momentum for reform. New leadership, rigorous training and a strict policy limiting gun use had an incredible result: In all of 2003 and much of 2004, not a single police bullet -- not one -- was fired. The police department went from being feared for the violence it often brought to some neighborhoods to being respected for the violence it prevented.

I retell this story because it dramatically illustrates the importance of maintaining open access to government records. If The Herald hadn't obtained those records and reported what they revealed, change likely wouldn't have occurred, and more innocent people might have died. Similar stories are common where the press or the public used freedom of information laws to bring to light inefficiencies, incompetence and outright corruption.

Government in the sunshine

In Florida, we have long valued ''government in the sunshine.'' State laws guaranteeing public access to government records and to government meetings are known commonly as the Sunshine Laws. It's an apt label, evoking the ancient medical belief that sunshine is the best disinfectant.

And yet today in Tallahassee and in Washington, D.C., lawmakers are working in ways to close much of the access that Floridians and Americans enjoy. To be sure, some of these steps are well intended to provide security against those who would do harm.

But each new law adds to a darkening shadow across our government, sheltering its actions from full view and thus our ability to criticize and correct. Florida legislators, for example, have filed almost 50 bills affecting the Sunshine Laws, most of them seeking exemptions from it. One bill seeks to reverse a constitutional amendment allowing medical consumers to research a physician's complaint history.

Exemptions sought

Another would hide information gathered in an investigation into a law-enforcement officer's actions. Sounds harmless enough -- until you realize that The Herald's ability to ferret out the wild-West behavior of several Miami cops could have been blocked had this proposal been the law.

Today is Sunshine Sunday, and it's why I'm writing this. This is a day set aside every year to remind Floridians of the importance of zealously guarding the public's ability to know what its government -- the government of the people -- is doing. Columns like mine will appear across the state and nation, supplemented by stories, commentary and perhaps public-service ads.

Our common enemy is apathy. We worry that most Americans won't notice, or worse, won't care, as their right to know what their government is doing slips away. This is no idle threat. A recent Knight Foundation survey of more than 100,000 high-school students found that nearly 75 percent had little understanding of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press, of religion, of assembly and of the right to petition government to redress grievances. More alarming, more than a third believe that the First Amendment goes too far.

And high-school students aren't alone. The council in a small, South Florida city was recently caught meeting in secret, even after being warned by the council attorney that such a meeting would break the law. The response from the mayor: Nobody will care. So far, the mayor appears to be right.

Madison's amendment

James Madison wrote the First Amendment, which underpins Florida's Sunshine Laws, to ensure that governmental power would always be restrained by a watchdog, typically the press. It is his birthday and his beliefs that are celebrated today.

The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black paid homage to Madison in 1971 when he concluded an opinion by writing, ``And paramount among the duties of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.''

Or, perhaps, to die of trigger-happy cops at home.

© 2005 Miami Herald

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