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While transcripts of Smith’s and Hickock’s later appeals can be found online quite easily, as of this writing that oddly elusive original transcript—which it appears many others were able to acquire in the years following the trial—remains publicly inaccessible. What would compel a state government to make it so difficult to gain access to historically significant public documents?
One need only turn to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Center for Public Integrity for one answer, when in 2015 they awarded Kansas a score of “F” for public access to information,[195] an evaluation based on research by determined advocates of transparency in government. One can only imagine what else is being shielded from the citizens of Kansas in the name of good public governance.
But things get even murkier when elected leaders take it upon themselves to decide what “good” means.
In a “preposterous opinion,” Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt “created an opportunity for each and every state employee to operate behind a curtain of secrecy,” by permitting state agencies’ staff to use their private email accounts to transact public business, immune from public disclosure. This veil of privacy came in the wake of Governor Sam Brownback’s budget director using his own private Yahoo email account to give sneak previews of the 2016 budget to influential lobbyists before it was sent to legislators. In a scathing editorial, The Kansas City Star excoriated the policy, which allowed state officials to “enlist special interests in shaping the public’s business...outside the public eye.”[196]
Two years later, following months of investigation detailed in a November 2017 article beneath the headline “One of the most secretive, dark states: What is Kansas trying to hide?,” The Kansas City Star exposed a multitude of covert activities and executive decisions shielded by the State from public view, revealing an obsessive pattern of secrecy that goes back decades, declaring: “Kansas runs one of the most secretive state governments in the nation, and its secrecy permeates nearly every aspect of service.... [With] examples [that], when stitched together, form a quilt of secrecy that envelops much of state government....”[197]
