(The Missouri General Assembly is back in session and it, the governor, and assorted denizens of the hallways will be generating ample material for observation for the next four months or so.  We are giving Dr. Frank Crane a bit of a vacation until the end of the session so we might increase the number of appropriate observations pertinent to the times. While they might be of questionable value to you, they are good therapy for your obedient observer. We begin with a story of early United States history and how it might play out in our time.)

Journalists sometimes have to decide whether to break a law by publishing information beneficial to the public or whether to withhold the information and therefore do a disservice to the public.

That ethical dilemma for the journalist who decides to publish then can become a legal issue that is uncomfortable for prosecutors, among others, to consider. When First Amendment protections of the press enter the mix, the situation offers only awkward choices.

Case in point:  Governor Parson is confident the Cole County Prosecutor will file a charge against a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who discovered a flaw in a computer program that endangered the security of personal information of thousands of Missouri educators. The governor believes he breached state law on computer information accessibility.

The newspaper did not publish the findings until the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had fixed the problem.  Clearly, from this observer’s standpoint, the public was better served.  But also clearly from the governor’s standpoint, a law was broken. And as a former sheriff, he took umbrage with what he perceived as law-breaking.

Former Missourian Ulysses Grant, on being sworn in as President of the United States on March 4, 1869, proclaimed, “Laws are to govern all alike—those opposed as well as those who favor them.  I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”

The sentiment often is credited erroneously to Abraham Lincoln, perhaps based on an 1838 Lyceum speech in Springfield, Illinois.

Throughout our country’s history, the rigidity of law has been challenged by those who push against that rigidity. We could regard the Declaration of Independence as our country’s greatest challenge to existing law, for example.  Or the Civil Rights movement in more recent decades.

But more than fifty years before the Declaration of Independence, an important and surprising legal decision was made that seems to be important to the disagreement about the propriety of the report on education department computer security.

John Peter Zenger, the publisher of The New York Weekly Journal, was accused of libel by Royal Governor William S. Cosby in 1733 after Zenger accused him of various corruptions including rigging elections.  Under the laws of the time, any publication of information critical of government was considered libelous.

Zenger lawyer Andrew Hamilton, the most famous colonial attorney of his time, did not deny the accusations had been printed. But he demanded the prosecutor to prove they were false. The judge told the jury it had to convict Zenger if it found he had, indeed, printed the stories. But the jury stunned the judge, the governor, and many others when it returned after only about ten minutes of deliberation and found Zenger NOT guilty.

The finding was the first time in this country that truth was considered an absolute defense against the governor’s complaint that the law prohibited publication of information critical of government.

That ruling is considered by some historians as critical to the circulation of ideas that led to the Declaration, the American Revolution, and the development of our Constitution and Bill of Rights—and the First Amendment that includes press freedom.

Can the “truth is an absolute defense” be used in the case of the Post-Dispatch story?  We’ll see.  It is unlikely this series of events will rise to the historical significance of the Zenger case. But free public knowledge of truth must have value in a free society and a chance to emphasize that value in this time of the Big Lie should not be missed.

The principle established in a courtroom 288 years ago casts a light on the governor’s belief that a law must be strictly enforced despite the exposure of truth and the prosecutor’s decision about how to best address the issue of public benefit versus strict obedience.