Mar 11, 2023 3 min read

Shooting someone to death in the parking lot of a strip mall is a heinous act.

It’s also a very public act. And that being the case, the public has a right to know the identity of suspects and why they are being held.

That didn’t happen, however, following the murder of Boyke Budiarachman in November. Budiarachman, a 49-year-old Indonesian native who worked at Fourth Street Foods in Charleroi and owned real estate, transportation and other companies operating in the area, was gunned down Nov. 5 in the parking lot of the Rostraver Square strip mall near Belle Vernon. Two days later, a suspect, 55-year-old Keven Van Lam of Philadelphia, was arrested in North Strabane. A judge immediately sealed the case, and the Observer-Reporter only found the name after reviewing the sealing order more than a week later. Other details of his arrest and the case were kept under wraps, including the charges Van Lam faced.

As a result, the Observer-Reporter and Herald-Standard sought to have the information brought to light. The newspapers, along with the Mon Valley Independent, were represented by lawyers from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization. Christopher Feliciani, a Court of Common Pleas judge in Westmoreland County, ruled that the docket information could remain concealed, but the Pennsylvania Superior Court overruled him, allowing the charges against Lam to be made public. The lawyers argued, simply, that the public has a right to know why someone is in police custody.

The efforts of the three newspapers following Budiarachman’s death are an example of what media outlets sometimes have to do to pry information from public officials. Pennsylvania and other states have right-to-know laws that presume that the work of public officials should be available for public inspection, though there are caveats attached for doctor-patient privilege, attorney-client privilege, and other limited exceptions. The federal government also has a Freedom of Information law that was signed in 1966, and it was just the third country in the world to enact such a law.

Sunday is the start of Sunshine Week, which is designed to shine a spotlight on the importance of transparency and openness in government. It also sheds light on how harmful excessive government secrecy can be.

We shouldn’t take the right of the public – and, yes, the press – to know about the workings of our government and law enforcement for granted. There has never been a shortage of public officials who would like to keep their work from the public’s eyes, who engage in demagogic attacks on the press, or would love to curtail the ability of the media to gather information. The ability of the press to do its work is an important part of keeping our democracy vital and healthy.

Countries like North Korea, Iran, Cuba, China and Syria have little or no press freedom. That’s not a road that we want to go down.