Government accountability was dealt a blow last week when Maine's highest court in effect said the public cannot see records of an investigation related to a highly controversial murder case.

In 2004, Attorney General Steven Rowe asked three lawyers to conduct an independent investigation of police and prosecutorial actions in the Dennis Dechaine murder case because of persistent charges of official misconduct by Dechaine supporters.

Dechaine, now 50, is serving a life sentence for the 1988 murder and rape of 12-year-old Sarah Cherry, who was abducted while baby sitting in her hometown of Bowdoin.

The lawyers who conducted the investigation issued their report in 2006 directly to Rowe, who subsequently issued it publicly. The report declared there had been no official misconduct.

Dechaine supporter James Moore, who has written two books about the case, subsequently filed a state Freedom of Access Act request for Rowe's records related to the commission and also for the records of the commission's deliberations as. Rowe's office turned over its documents. But the commission Rowe assembled did not. The state's Freedom of Access Act decrees that the records of the deliberations and communications of Maine government agencies and their agents and staff should be open to the public. But the Rowe commission members claimed their panel was not a government entity and thus their deliberations were not subject to the requirement that it turn over its records.

Moore sued to get access to the panel's deliberations, lost in the lower court and last week, in a 3-2 ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the lower court's ruling, using weak arguments in its opinion to distance the work of the panel from Rowe's office.

The justices wrote that the Rowe commission was simply not a government commission. Its members got no pay or funding from the state, they "acted solely as private citizens," and the commission's "activities were supported principally by the office of one of the attorney members of the group."

Yet in their majority opinion, the justices also admit that, "the three attorneys in this case were asked by the Attorney General to conduct an independent investigation and to report the results of their investigation to the Attorney General." Indeed, Attorney General Rowe laid out the questions he wanted the panel to answer.

And, we might add -- as Justice Jon Levy wrote in his dissent, joined by Justice Andrew Mead -- the fact that such an investigation was conducted by private individuals does not diminish its public nature.

Writes Levy: "The investigatory panel organized by the Attorney General was clearly performing a traditional government function -- the internal investigation of allegations of prosecutorial and law enforcement misconduct."

With this ruling, the majority on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court has paved the way for the establishment of government-formed panels of private citizens whose deliberations are beyond public scrutiny. That's just plain wrong, it's undemocratic and it will put the actions and statements of many of those carrying out government's agenda beyond the scrutiny of the public whom they supposedly serve.