PROVIDENCE -- The plea arrangement for the owners of The Station nightclub will spare Rhode Island the trauma of reliving the 2003 fire that killed 100 people, but it also denies the state the opportunity to hear answers, in open court, from witnesses under oath.

Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch will seek a court order to allow the public release of 10 months of secret grand jury testimony in the case, and will release other evidence gathered during discovery "in an orderly fashion," a spokesman said yesterday.

With the club's owners, Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, scheduled to make their pleas in court on Friday, the attorney general is expected to make the motion to release the records the following week, said Deputy Attorney General Gerald Coyne. Opening secret grand jury transcripts to the public requires a court order, generally from the presiding justice of the Superior Court, Judge Joseph F. Rodgers, Coyne said.

Lynch's efforts to release the material may temper some of the outrage among people affected by the case, who had been denied by the plea bargain a chance to hear the main players in the nation's fourth-deadliest nightclub fire answer questions under oath.

Dave Kane, whose 18-year-old son, Nicholas O'Neill, died in the fire, doubts the attorney general will release enough information to answer the lingering questions about the fire.

"You're not going to see any smoking guns," Kane said. "None of that's going to come forward now."

James C. Gahan III, whose son James C. Gahan IV died in the fire, said he does not think the evidence Lynch gathered will get at the truth anyway. "There'll be more truth coming out in the civil trial for one reason: there are better lawyers handling that case."

Superior Court Judge Francis J. Darigan Jr.'s decision to accept the pleas over the objection of the attorney general, in return for Michael Derderian serving four years in jail and Jeffrey Derderian performing community service, leaves many questions unanswered about Rhode Island's deadliest fire.

"This is an incredible insult to tell me you're going to 'spare me' the only opportunity to get justice for my child," said Kane.

Consider the unanswered questions around West Warwick fire inspector Denis P. Larocque. His voice, publicly silent now for more than three years, is what many people wanted to hear on the stand. Larocque inspected the club several times before the fire and never noted in any of his reports the illegal and highly flammable packing foam on the walls, used for sound insulation, which burned like gasoline once sparked by pyrotechnics fired by the rock band Great White.

How did he not note the foam?

And it was Larocque who twice in three months raised the nightclub's legal capacity, to 404 people, after Michael Derderian asked if the building could hold more. A year before the fire, the club's capacity was set at 253 people in its normal configuration and 317 when tables and chairs were removed.

Why did he raise the capacity?

Some 458 people were inside the nightclub when it burned on Feb. 20, 2003, killing 100 people and injuring more than 200 others.

"We were failed basically at all levels," said Gahan, listing town and state inspectors, the Derderians and, now, the judiciary.

Also in dispute is whether the band had the Derderians' permission to use pyrotechnics.

Judge Darigan has said that avoiding a trial was "in the best interest of all parties," including the community. Presenting evidence in open court, "would only serve to further traumatize and victimize not only the loved ones of the deceased and the survivors of the fire, but the general public as well," Darigan wrote in a letter to Station victims.

Gahan said the families of those who died had steeled themselves for a trial. "It was not going to be a pleasant process, but we were prepared for it."

Kane agreed.

"To tell me the trial is going to make me upset is foolish," he said. "To tell me they're going to make me go through it again insinuates it ever stops, and it doesn't."

Plea bargains, says David M. Zlotnick, a professor at the Ralph R. Papitto School of Law at Roger Williams University, are like shorthand in the court system. They have plenty of benefits, such as reducing the risk of losing an important case. As Darigan mentioned in a letter to victims, plea deals also avoid costly trials.

But trials, too, have benefits, Zlotnick said. They let the public see all the facts. Sometimes victims want to tell their stories.

"This is a very hard case to predict what would happen, and so the parties, I think, were under a lot of pressure to plead out because it was too unpredictable," he said.

But "if you go to trial, you have a full record. At least you have a full airing of the offense and the facts," he said. "So I think the public has better grounds on which to evaluate the judge's sentence. This might be a very fair sentence, given what the judge knows about the case, but we don't know that because we haven't heard all the facts."

Defense attorneys planned to put Larocque on the stand to show that he overlooked the foam. They believed the information would have helped shift the burden of responsibility away from the Derderians, said Kathleen Hagerty, who represents Michael Derderian.

"We hung the foam in the nightclub but there are so many extenuating circumstances that we would have brought out," Hagerty said. The brothers, she said, had ordered "sound foam," which in any place of public assembly must be fire-retardant.

"But instead of getting the sound foam they'd ordered," said Hagerty, "they got packing foam and were never told that they weren't getting the sound foam they had ordered."

Foam is sold with a material data warning safety sheet, Hagerty said, but that information was never given to the Derderians by the salesman from American Foam.

"And we would have presented testimony from employees of American Foam who would have told the jury that they were under orders from the owner not to supply that sheet unless the buyer specifically asked for it," Hagerty said. "But the manufacturer of the foam had sent a letter to the distributors encouraging them to give the safety sheet to the end-user."

Hagerty also said that the defense would have presented evidence that Larocque had inspected The Station six times after the foam was installed but never cited the Derderians for having flammable foam in their club. He did cite the brothers for having a club door "which was covered with foam" with a broken panic bar. Hegarty said the only way to open the door was to put your hand through the foam and push the panic bar.

Larocque was never charged with any crimes related to The Station. State laws protect public officials from lawsuits unless it can be proven their actions were intentionally malicious.

Lynch has been less forthcoming to date with what he believed was the strength of his case, but has said the prosecution would have proven that the Derderians had allowed other bands to use pyrotechnics at least 20 times at The Station, and that they had packed the place beyond its legal capacity the night of the blaze.

The plea arrangement itself generated another unanswered question.

Whose deal is it?

The defense maintains that Lynch's office proposed the deal, but then backed away from it. Lawyer Thomas Dickinson, who represents Jeffrey Derderian, has said that prosecutor William Ferland told him "he had authority" to offer a plea deal. Dickinson said yesterday that Ferland did not name Lynch as the source of his authority, though Dickinson had assumed he meant the attorney general.

That's all wrong, Lynch has said. He maintains his office never offered the deal, and that Judge Darigan inserted himself into the process and set the terms of the sentences over Lynch's objections. Darigan has said that when the prosecution and defense could not reach agreement despite weeks of haggling, he decided how the plea would be resolved.

The judge yesterday refused to discus the dispute.

Zlotnick, the law professor, said the controversy illustrates a downside of plea bargains.

"People are saying, 'I didn't say that,' 'I didn't mean that,' " he said. "That's the downside of allowing an informal system with judge participation. The downside is that sometimes people disagree about what happened in chambers and there's no court reporter in chambers and we don't know what happened."

The dispute does not reflect well on the criminal justice system, Zlotnick said. And it short-circuits the legal process, which is set up so that if the prosecution and defense cannot agree, there is a trial and all the facts can come out.

"I think what's happening here is Lynch and the judge disagreed. They have disagreed about what the case was worth, so now they're just taking positions," Zlotnick said. "But it's not being done in a way that I think is reassuring to the public that the criminal justice system is working fairly, and I don't think it's done in a way that victims are walking away feeling as if their voices were heard because prosecutors are now saying, 'We got a bad deal.'

"What troubles me is if we can't have agreement, why not have a trial?"

With reports from Tracy Breton.

marsenau@projo.com / (401) 277-7231

tbreton@projo.com / (401) 277-7362

kbramson@projo.com / (401) 277-7470