Records/Archives in the News 04/19/98 Part 4
There are five stories in this posting.
Sacramento Bee 4/17/98
File discovery delays sanity trial for killer:
Irish Times April 17, 1998
Doctor claims that legislation is unworkable
Los Angeles Times April 17, 1998
Putting the Inquisition on Trial
Africa News Service 4/17/98
Depositors May Sue Over Poor Records
Washington Post April 18, 1998
Employers and E-mail (Editorial)
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Sacramento Bee 4/17/98
File discovery delays sanity trial for killer: Defense gets week to study
hospital reports
By Claire Cooper
<snip>
SAN RAFAEL -- A judge on Thursday postponed Horace Kelly's sanity hearing
because 220 pages of his prison hospital records were missing from files that
were handed over to his lawyers.
The results of the jury trial will determine whether Kelly is mentally fit to
be executed.
Marin County Superior Court Judge William McGivern ordered San Quentin State
Prison to provide the defense with Kelly's complete psychiatric and medical
records, and the prison said it complied on March 24.
But on Wednesday prison officials came up with 220 more pages, showing Kelly
was admitted to the prison hospital nine times for psychiatric or related
matters.
With the jury out of the courtroom, defense attorney Richard Mazer asked
McGivern to postpone the hearing so that psychiatric witnesses could become
familiar with the newly found material.
"The materials are highly relevant," Mazer said.
Ed Berberian, the Marin County prosecutor who will try to persuade the jury
that Kelly is sane, opposed the delay, saying the records were unimportant.
The purpose of the sanity hearing is to determine Kelly's present
comprehension, not his history, Berberian said.
But Mazer said prosecutors will tell the jury that Kelly is malingering. He
said the evidence of long-standing, severe mental illness would refute those
arguments.
"We are talking schizophrenia. These are not the kinds of things that come and
go like some form of mild neurosis," Mazer said.
Kelly was sentenced to death in Riverside and San Bernardino counties for the
murders of two women and an 11-year-old boy.
His execution had been set for Tuesday but was postponed until the jury
decides whether he is sane. State and federal law forbid execution of the
insane.
<snip>
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Irish Times April 17, 1998
Doctor claims that legislation is unworkable
By Alison O'Connor
<snip>
The new legislation covering access to patient records was described as
unworkable at the annual general meeting of the Irish Medical Organisation.
Calling it "blunderbuss" legislation, Dr Denis Cusack, director of legal
medicine in the UCD Medical Faculty, said it was so confusing that the
Department of Health should carry out an information campaign before its
introduction in October.
The Freedom of Information Act includes access to patient records. But Dr
Cusack said a separate piece of "clear, simple" legislation, similar to that
introduced in the UK, should have been enacted in Ireland.
Under the Act, public patients will have a right to their records. A series of
public bodies is covered, including the Department of Health, the Blood
Transfusion Service Board, Comhairle na nOspidial, the Irish Medicines Board
and health boards.
But the Act does not at present cover non-health board hospitals, private
clinics or private hospitals.
Health board chief executives rather than doctors would have the power to
disclose the information for public patients. Under the data protection
legislation all patients had the right to ask for records which were on
computer.
However, despite the pending introduction of the Freedom of Information Act,
private patients will still only have a right of access to computerised
records held by their doctor.
In the future health boards would be deemed to be the holder of the records of
public patients. It was more than likely that Chief Executive Officers would
delegate this matter, he said.
Dr Cusack said the basic rule on patient records was that a request for
personal information was to be refused unless asked for by the patient or
someone nominated by the patient. However, there was a clause which stated
that the request could be refused if the CEO felt it was prejudicial to the
mental or emotional condition of the person requesting it. In that event a
doctor might be nominated by the patient to look at the records.
Dr Cusack said that in general he welcomed the Freedom of Information
legislation.
<snip>
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Los Angeles Times April 17, 1998
Putting the Inquisition on Trial
Pope's push to 'purify' church leads to opening of records on persecution of
heretics. Files may shed light on cases such as the miller who said life
evolved the way cheese rots--and was burned at the stake.
By RICHARD BOUDREAUX,
MONTEREALE VALCELLINA, Italy--An odd little shrine to this village's favorite
son stands in the cobblestoned piazza outside the Domenico Scandella Social
Center. It depicts a wheel of cheese, minus one slice. Water trickles through
tiny holes in the cheese. The water is supposed to represent worms.
There is no inscription, but any villager can explain: Domenico Scandella
was a verbose and stubborn 16th century miller with dangerous ideas. In a
dramatic showdown with his interrogators, he insisted that the universe
evolved "just as cheese is made out of milk--and worms appeared in it, and
these were the angels . . . and among [them] was God."
For this, Scandella was tortured and burned at the stake--one of tens of
thousands of accused heretics, blasphemers, witches, false mystics, devil
worshipers, Protestants and lapsed converts from Judaism ferreted out and
condemned for their beliefs by the Roman Catholic tribunals of the
Inquisition.
With its call for an "examination of conscience" on the eve of
Christianity's third millennium, the Vatican has opened most of its central
archives on the Roman Inquisition to give scholars a clearer picture of these
persecutions in medieval and early modern Europe.
The opening is a windfall for historians--documents covering 3 1/2
centuries of heresy trials, theological controversies and book bannings--as
well as a test of the growing body of revisionist thinking that the
Inquisition wasn't so bad after all. The Inquisition and the church's Index of
Forbidden Books have been studied extensively from records in Italian
provincial archives, but until now much has remained hidden in secret Vatican
files in Rome.
The miller's tale, first gleaned from provincial records 22 years ago, is
a sample of the discoveries that may be in store. People here were stunned at
first by the sudden unearthing of a scandalous, forgotten past, but eventually
embraced the miller as a freethinking hero.
"We have overcome the years of aversion to this person," said Father
Giacinto Biscontin, a Catholic priest with the unusual role of host to
periodic church gatherings in a heretic's honor. "Now he is part of our
history. We have no problem with that."
The reconciliation of this village with its past is, in a peculiar way,
the kind of "purification" that Pope John Paul II is demanding of his entire
flock. In the countdown to 2000, he has voiced regret over Catholics' role in
the slave trade and their passivity during the Nazi slaughter of Jews. He has
admitted that Galileo was wrongly censured by the Inquisition for asserting
that Earth was not the center of the universe.
"The church," the pope says repeatedly, "has no fear of historical
truth."
How Far to Go?
And yet, how far can the church go in "regretting" its own thought
police? The Inquisition, after all, was authorized and led by previous popes
to suppress heresy, and it still operates today under a different name--the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith--occasionally excommunicating an
outspoken priest or barring a rebel theologian from teaching.
An answer could come this fall when John Paul addresses a congress of
eminent scholars summoned to the Vatican to put the Inquisition itself on
trial. It will be the Holy See's first critical look at its record of
repression.
Debate over the Inquisition's methods is nearly as old as the institution
itself, which dates to 1233. Holy inquisitors for centuries had papal blessing
to torture any accused heretic into confessing, and their cruelty became a
standard by which later atrocities were measured.
The Spanish Inquisition, set up in 1478 by that nation's monarchs with a
nod from Pope Sixtus IV, grew so zealous that the Vatican often condemned its
excesses. Yet the Roman Inquisition, founded in 1542 as a Vatican agency to
counter the Protestant Reformation, also sent heretics to die by garroting or
to burn at the stake until 1727. Such horrors faded with the Enlightenment as
popes and civil rulers grew more tolerant of religious dissent.
Many historians have softened toward the Inquisition in recent decades,
arguing that uniformity of religious belief was needed to curb anarchy in
medieval Europe. Their studies show that torture was used sparingly and that
less than 2% of the Inquisition's known suspects were executed. Any defendant,
they note, could have an attorney, a right not yet introduced in secular
courts.
"It was actually a very progressive tribunal and dispensed a very high
level of law in 16th century terms," said John Tedeschi, professor emeritus of
church history at the University of Wisconsin.
The Vatican hopes that the Roman Inquisition's newly opened archives will
bolster that view. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Inquisition's
successor agency, said the opening reflects that body's "confidence in the
face of any critical and serious investigation."
But some scholars say they believe that the decision was forced by the
pope on a reluctant Vatican bureaucracy and must be read as a rebuke of the
past.
"The Inquisition remains shameful, no doubt about that," said Carlo
Ginzburg, one of Italy's premier historians and a professor of Italian
Renaissance studies at UCLA. "The opening of the archives is deeply symbolic
because it implies the idea of rejecting, turning the page of a long chapter
of the church's history and trying to clean its image."
Ratzinger credits Ginzburg, a Jew and self-professed atheist, with
provoking a decisive Vatican debate over the archives with his 1979 letter
urging the pope to unlock them.
The Vatican reacted with characteristic speed: Twelve years later it
began granting unpublicized access to selected scholars. Only in January did
it announce the formal opening to "qualified researchers" of any religious
belief who are affiliated with universities.
Archivists caution that many files were lost after Napoleon's troops
carted them to Paris in 1810. And all files after 1903 remain off limits--a
can of worms that will stay unopened to avoid aggravating such disputes as
abortion, clerical celibacy and papal infallibility that divide Catholics
today.
Still, that leaves about 4,500 volumes suddenly available for scrutiny in
a small Vatican reading room with outlets for laptops.
"Centuries after these events, we are being offered ringside seats at
some of history's critical turning points," said a commentary in Inside the
Vatican, an independent magazine. "We will be able to peek at the minutes of
key Vatican meetings when decisions were taken to prosecute or not prosecute."
The potential for discovery is wide open. Little is known, for example,
about the workings of the Index, the Inquisition branch that until 1966
decreed which books were to be burned as heretical and which Catholics
excommunicated for possessing them.
Gigliola Gragnito, professor of early modern history at Italy's
University of Parma, said her reading of the newly opened archives has turned
up a surprising volume of mail to the Index voicing popular resistance to its
1596 ban on Italian translations of the New Testament.
Scholars arguing that the Vatican fostered anti-Semitism--a hot issue in
today's debate over responsibility for the Holocaust--say they will look for
archives detailing the Inquisition's orders to burn the Talmud and evict Jews
from the Papal States.
Trials of the Heretics
But it's the drama of the interrogation, the exchange between inquisitor
and heretic, that holds the most fascination for students of that era and
casual readers of history. The newly opened archives are said to offer
complete transcripts of previously unreported trials.
And it's the mind of the lowly heretic that most fascinates Ginzburg. His
research in provincial archives has revealed an insular world of pagan peasant
beliefs that was every bit as subversive of Catholic authority as were the
writings of Martin Luther that sparked the Reformation.
The trial of the heretic Scandella, disclosed in Ginzburg's 1976 book,
"The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller," is a
case in point.
Born here in 1532, in the early days of printing, the self-educated
miller, nicknamed Menocchio, was a practicing Catholic who served as
administrator of the local church. But he was influenced less by Sunday
homilies than by the books he devoured and the oral culture of ancient
folklore.
For example, in a text by an Augustinian monk, Scandella had read that
the universe began as "a great and inchoate matter." But in confessions to the
inquisitors, he twisted this concept beyond recognition into one holding that
all life--and God himself--evolved like rotting cheese. He was influenced,
Ginzburg believes, by an ancient myth that the world rose from a milky,
curdling sea.
"It was not the book as such," the historian said, "but the encounter
between the printed page and oral culture that formed an explosive mixture in
Menocchio's head" and inspired a cosmology all his own.
Unfortunately for Scandella, he was expanding his mind and loosening his
tongue just as the Vatican was trying to stamp out the Reformation. The
inquisitors refused to believe that this man, who insisted that all faiths
were equal before God and who railed against clerical privilege, had not been
brainwashed by some Protestant sect.
Demanding names of accomplices, they tortured him on a
strappado--hoisting him to the ceiling by a rope, then suddenly dropping him
part way to the floor. But he kept insisting, "My opinions came out of my own
head."
He was found guilty of voicing heretical opinions "not only with men of
religion, but also with simple and ignorant people," undermining their loyalty
to the church. Pope Clement VIII was alarmed by the case and sent the miller,
then 67 and ailing, to the stake.
Scandella's simple white church still stands here in the wine-growing
hills of Friuli, an hour's drive northeast of Venice. But the village had lost
all memory of the miller until Ginzburg came across the trial records in
nearby Udine and published his book.
"It hit like a bombshell," said Marco Scandella, a retired bricklayer and
presumed descendant of the miller. "Such a history was never suspected."
Aldo Colonello, a local schoolteacher, said he believes that he knows why
the village had forgotten. Scandella, he noted, was a popular, trusted citizen
whose opinions were tolerated until the parish priest, who had quarreled with
the miller over church funds and was suspected of trying to seduce his
daughter, denounced him to the Inquisition. By then, no one dared defend him.
"Everyone here lost," Colonello said. "Menocchio lost, the local church
lost, the village lost. The case had escaped the community's control. After
the execution, the priest left town. To heal their discomfort, the others
simply removed Menocchio from their memory."
Centuries later, as villagers were absorbing Ginzburg's careful
reconstruction, debate arose over the name of a new social center that would
cater to the sick and the elderly and provide a community library and
conference center.
Versatile Cult Hero
Colonello suggested naming it for Scandella. The miller had also been a
teacher and violinist at festivals, he noted, "so he was representative of the
whole community." Some villagers opposed honoring such a notorious figure, but
a majority professed admiration, and his name was adopted.
In return, Scandella has given the village a colorful identity and a
versatile cult hero whose story is taught in schools and acted out in plays
across northeastern Italy.
To some in this prosperous region chafing at Rome's political control,
Scandella symbolizes defiance of distant authority. To others, his religious
tolerance is a lesson of how Italy should treat immigrants from Asia and
Africa.
"He had the courage to criticize," said Mayor Nevio Alzetta, "and maybe
that's what enthralls the common people."
Just as important, the mayor added, is the local self-examination
Scandella's story has inspired. The social center has published 30 works of
local historical research and expanded its library to 25,000 volumes, a
remarkable collection for a village of 4,500 people.
As they plan festivities next year marking the 400th anniversary of
Scandella's death, people here don't seem to care whether the Vatican regrets
his persecution as long as it bares all the facts. The prevailing sentiment
is, "OK, so he was a heretic, but he was our heretic."
"Of course it was unjust what they did to him, but for those days it was
inevitable," said Gina Morandini, who runs the local Textile Artists Assn. "He
was too far ahead of his time."
<snip>
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Africa News Service 4/17/98
Depositors May Sue Over Poor Records
<snip>
Johannesburg (Business Day, April 17, 1998) - About 10 000 depositors in the
defunct Islamic Bank who submitted claims earlier this year have been informed
by Deloitte & Touche, the liquidators, that they are unable to process the
claims because of the bank's "inaccurate accounting records".
The former chairman and directors of the bank could be sued for recklessness
and negligence by the depositors.
The Islamic Bank became insolvent last year with debts estimated at between
R50m and R70m. The Reserve Bank granted it funds to compensate depositors up
to R50 000 a depositor, which would cover more than 80% of those affected.
"People are furious and sentiment in the Muslim community is that Ebrahim
Kharsany (the CEO) and directors are getting away scot-free and something has
to be done about it," one of the depositors said. Bungling up accounting
procedures was a serious violation of basic business
principles.
Deloitte & Touche partner Andrew Wilkins confirmed that accounting records
were "inaccurately maintained and had to be reconciled" and was the main
reason for the delay in paying out depositors. Another reason for the delay
was that many depositors had filled in their forms incorrectly.
Wilkins said a confidential inquiry in terms of section 417 and section 418 of
the Companies Act had begun and would include a probe into the directors'
activities. The inquiry was being conducted by a commissioner appointed by the
Master of the High Court.
"We will also use the inquiry to investigate lending and this will no doubt
assist us in collecting amounts owed to the bank," said Wilkins.
Haroon Laher of law firm Goldman Judin & Werner said most of the depositors
had invested their life savings in the bank. Laher contended that depositors
would have a good case against the directors in accordance with a precedent in
a recent case where the Appeal Court "gave definition to what constituted
reckless trading and conduct on the part of directors".
He said some depositors had approached his firm to discuss possible
litigation. "In my view if it is found that improper records were kept, that
could be a blatant act of recklessness, with far-reaching consequences."
By Shareen Singh
<snip>
_________________________________________________________________
Washington Post April 18, 1998
Employers and E-mail (Editorial)
<snip>
MOST PEOPLE are introduced to e-mail and Internet access in the workplace, and
it's in the workplace that they discover, too often, a lesser-known aspect of
this exceptionally fluid and informal form of communication: It has no
guarantee of privacy. Nevertheless, for reasons that have occasioned much
armchair psychological speculation, most of those new to e-mail seem to act as
if they had a very high expectation of privacy -- indeed, as if they are
talking to intimate friends. E-mailers also frequently blurt out things
electronically that would never be said face to face.
Whether this is because e-mail "has few social cues and seems ephemeral," as
two legal analysts muse in the journal of the Association for Computing
Machinery, or for some other reason, it turns out to be quite wrong. Legal
claims to e-mail privacy in the workplace have generally failed in court, from
the Nissan Motor Corp. case -- in which a supervisor showing a large group the
uses of e-mail inadvertently displayed a private sexual message from one
employee to another -- to the California case in which an e-mail trainer was
fired for gross insubordination after she tried to block supervisors' policy
of reading all the messages exchanged in her classes.
Courts have rejected claims that reading employee e-mail constitutes
unreasonable search and seizure (because there is no "reasonable expectation"
that a piece of a company system is private), or that it violates federal
wiretapping laws that restrict monitoring of employee telephone calls (since
an e-mail message read in storage is not being "intercepted."). The
consequences of reckless e-mail use can cut upward, too, as happened to the
CEO who had to settle with a fired employee suing him for age discrimination
after discovery proceedings were able to retrieve previously deleted e-mails
from the company system urging the firing in offensive terms.
The unsuspected permanence of supposedly discarded e-mails is particularly
dangerous in a medium that for many workplaces has become central not just to
work but to water-cooler socializing and procrastination. Do hooked-up
employees waste more time Net-surfing and e-chatting -- "cyberlollygagging,"
as one survey called it -- than the average crossword-puzzle-doer or hallway
gossiper? Or will the apparently addictive qualities of the medium be
counterbalanced over time by the knowledge that, unlike reading a magazine
under your desk, cyberlollygagging leaves detailed records in company
property? The uncertainty of employers on this point could provide one more
motive for employers to snoop through employee files -- contributing, despite
safeguards in other areas, to the trend toward a more monitored work day.
<snip>
Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
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