A government for the people and by the people is a government accountable to the people -- a lesson that has been momentarily lost on the members of a commission set up by Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe.

In 2004, Rowe established a three-man panel to review allegations of misconduct by police and prosecutors in the Dennis Dechaine murder case. Those allegations -- among them that prosecutors and police had misled the jury, destroyed evidence and ignored other suspects -- had persisted through the many years since Dechaine had been convicted of the 1988 rape and killing of a 12-year-old girl, Sarah Cherry, and sentenced to life in prison.

Rowe, acting in his official capacity as state attorney general, asked retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Eugene Beaulieu and attorneys Charles Abbott and Marvin Glazier to conduct the investigation. Two years later, in 2006, they issued their report, in which they determined there was no misconduct. That report, four pages long, was issued without any accompanying documents or notes.

That's when James Moore, who had written two books about the Dechaine case, filed a state Freedom of Access Act request for Rowe's records related to the commission and the records of the commission's deliberations. That act decrees that records of deliberations and communications of Maine government agencies and their agents and staff should be open to the public.

Since the commission was empaneled by the attorney general and since it was considering allegations of government misconduct, Moore maintained it was indeed a government entity and was thus subject to the Freedom of Access Act and must turn over its records. Rowe's office spokesman says the attorney general turned over the documents he had, but when Moore got no response from the commission members, he appealed to Superior Court, where Justice Robert Crowley ruled -- wrongly, we believe -- that the commission wasn't a government agency, was independent of government control, received no government funding and thus was not subject to the act.

Well, if it looks like a government commission, works like a government commission, acts like a government commission, is created by a high-level government official to review official government conduct and addresses its report to that high government official in his official capacity at his official address -- it's functionally a government beast.

It sure sounds strange to us to maintain the review panel was not a government commission and thus was not subject to the state's freedom of access laws. It's also just plain unwise for the commission members to be tightfisted about their deliberations -- as is usually the case when that happens, it just intensifies the interest and scrutiny. Nobody goes away when the door is slammed in their face, especially when the subject is alleged government misconduct.

The case is now before Maine's highest court, where Moore has been joined in his appeal by the Maine Civil Liberties Union. We hope the court will rule that the state's Freedom of Access Act applies to such creatures as the citizen commission empaneled by the attorney general. If it doesn't, get ready for a lot of such commissions, whose work will then be beyond public review and whose members will be beyond accountability. If that happens, the law needs to be changed.