No Grenades on Election Eve

The long-awaited Decaria report will be delayed again, according to this morning's Standard-Examiner story.

"It's not done, which is unfortunate, County Attorney Decaria told Ace Reporter Schwebke yesterday. Mr. Decaria expects to release this report NEXT Monday -- the day before the election -- today's headline story reports. Unfortunate indeed, we say -- disastrous might be a better description. Mr. Decaria, (himself a candidate (unopposed for re-election on the Democratic ticket,) presently finds himself in a real political tight spot, we think. At this stage of the game his position is lose-lose, if he releases his report on the eve of an important State Senate election.

If his report exonerates Jon Greiner, he'll be accused of playing politics, and helping out his law enforcement colleague, a Republican. If the report slams Greiner, Mr. Decaria will be accused of dropping a political grenade to help out his cronies in the Democratic party.

The public's right to know bumps headlong into the public's equally-important right to a fair election in this instance, we think. Whatever conclusions are contained in the report, the public will have little time to rationally digest them, if released next Monday, and neither political party with horses in the Senate 18 race will have fair opportunity to respond with their own interpretations prior to the election. Whatever the conclusions, Mr. Decaria's report could be political dynamite, subject to pre-election "spinning" by folks with less-than-noble motives.

The best strategy for Mr. Decaria at this juncture, we think, is to withhold his findings until after the election. The public has waited for a couple of months now, and the public can wait another couple of days.

We'd feel differently if Mr. Decaria were releasing a binding judicial decision based upon the adversarial input of all the parties involved in this unfortunate mess. Mr. Decaria's opinion in this instance however, will be one man's opinion only, and will not be legally-binding on anyone.

Regardless of the nature of the findings in Mr. Decaria's report, we believe Mr. Decaria should exercise sound prosecutorial discretion, and release his report in a manner best calculated to cause the least confusion and disruption of the election process.

That means AFTER the election, gentle readers.

That's out position and we're sticking to it.

And what say our gentle readers about this?

(We'll post a link to the Std-Ex story as soon as it's available on the web, by the way. At the moment, the Std-Ex storage site seems to be experiencing technical problems.)

Congrats to the Std-Ex for this, BTW. It couldn't have happened to a nicer newspaper. And we at Weber County Forum would like to think we play our own small part in helping boost Standard-Examiner circulation. Focusing daily as we do, on the stories that appear on the Std-Ex print edition pages, we believe we enhance the Std-Ex's relevance in our community. Notwithstanding the frequent "digs" that appear on our electronic pages, we don't know what we'd do without the Std-Ex. We get the feeling sometimes that they look at us as news-vampires. We view the relationship as symbiotic and mutually beneficial, however.

Don't let the cat get your tongues this morning, folks.