Neither former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. nor the state police superintendent at the time, Thomas E. "Tim" Hutchins, agreed to be interviewed by the Sachs team. That's unconscionable. Mr. Hutchins has agreed to appear before a legislative committee next week, and we eagerly await his testimony.
But the 93-page Sachs report and its stack of accompanying documents should be required reading for civics classes, state police cadets and supervisors as a lesson in what not to do. It recommends the police identify the citizens who were spied on, let them review the material and then purge their files as a minimum first step toward undoing the wrongs committed in this case.
The report reaffirms citizens' right to speak freely and gather peacefully with whomever they want even as it lays out the ever present potential for bureaucratic inertia, abuse and waste. As Mr. Sachs rightly points out, taxpayer dollars would have been far better spent fighting real rather than imagined criminals.
