State lawmakers are busy setting priorities for the coming legislative session – and in our opinion, a series of recommendations from Reinvent Albany and Scrutinize should be high on the list.

Only about 6% of local court decisions are eventually published in the state record, and judges end up choosing the decisions they publish. That’s the very definition of the foxes guarding the henhouse.

The groups are calling on criminal courts to make judges’ written decisions or transcripts of oral decisions available online. These would include decisions dealing with admissibility of evidence, if a case presented to a grand jury should continue or not, prosecutorial misconduct, speedy trial rulings, if warrants are overly broad or properly handled and orders deciding if a prosecutor should be able to keep evidence from the defense.

These are the decisions made every day that affect who ends up in jail or not and, just as importantly, whether or not people accused of serious crimes end up walking the streets to potentially commit further crimes. Often, as we have seen locally, these decisions are often appealed – but unless someone is in court to hear the judge’s oral orders members of the press and public don’t find out about the decisions unless they are tipped off by an attorney. That’s a horrible way for the public to hold the court system accountable or to judge the effectiveness of criminal justice reforms. Three years after the state’s 2019 criminal justice reforms, there are still arguments over how they’ve worked that could be resolved if it was easier to see judges’ legal reasoning for their decisions.

State Sen. Michael Gianaris, D-Astoria and Senate majority leader, told the Albany Times Union he plans to introduce legislation to increase transparency in the state’s criminal courts. Making the decisions available makes sense.

Already the state Court of Appeals and Appellate Division cases are available for free publicly, so it stands to reason that the lower court cases from which those higher courts are getting their cases should be available publicly at no charge too.

This should be a matter both Republicans and Democrats in the state Legislature can get behind.