Secrecy That Kills

Editorial | The New York Times

02 June 14

ne of the maddening aspects of the General Motors safety scandal is the company’s maneuvering to conceal vital information about an ignition switch defect from government regulators and the public. The defect is linked to 13 deaths and many serious injuries.

For more than a decade, G.M. was aware of the faulty switches that caused some of its cars to accelerate suddenly and deactivate air bags. But as Bill Vlasic of The Times has reported, the company kept the danger hidden from regulators and from the public by reaching legal settlements with families that were conditioned on the families keeping silent. In at least one case involving a fatal 2010 crash, a court helped make such secrecy possible with a protective order sealing case records, as too often happens in product liability litigation. G.M. did not seriously face up to the problem until a scheduled deposition by a senior company official in a civil lawsuit threatened to expose the cover-up and implicate senior G.M. officials.

Partly as a result of the Times report, two senators — Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut — have introduced a bill that would make it harder for companies to hide behind private agreements with plaintiffs. Their modest but potentially lifesaving measure, the Sunshine in Litigation Act of 2014, would require federal judges to consider the public’s interest in transparency before sealing court records in civil actions, or approving settlement agreements in cases affecting public health and safety. Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, earlier introduced the same bill in the House, where it still lacks a Republican co-sponsor.

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