PROVIDENCE –– Dozens of new laws approved in the General Assembly’s final days may be dead following Governor Carcieri’s decision yesterday to veto 36 bills, including one that would improve access to public information, another that sought to “quash and destroy” criminal records and still others addressing foreclosure and medical marijuana.

Yesterday’s barrage of vetoes ends a four-day period in which the Republican governor vetoed 49 bills that had been approved late last month before the Democrat-dominated Assembly adjourned for the year.

Carcieri’s spokeswoman said yesterday that he had finished exercising his veto power this year, leaving it up to the legislature to hold a special session before January to rescue the swath of bills from an otherwise quiet death.

Among the new laws on the chopping block is one that watchdog groups had praised as a substantial victory for good government.

The law would have amended the state’s public records act for the first time in more than a decade, requiring police departments and other public bodies to release public information faster than the 10-day window outlined in current law.

“My administration strongly believes that the records of Rhode Island agencies should be fully transparent and open to the public,” Carcieri said in his veto message. But “if enacted, this bill would force our law-enforcement agencies to publicly release information that may compromise public safety.”

Representatives from the watchdog group Common Cause and the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union blasted the governor’s veto decision, noting that the bill was crafted with input from the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association.

“The governor’s veto of the open records bill demonstrates a shocking indifference to the public’s right to know,” ACLU executive director Steven Brown said. “In terms of police records, the bill did not expand in any way the type of information that is currently required to be disclosed under the law. It merely expedited the release of certain police information to allow for the public to be informed of arrests more promptly.”

The legislation would have required state agencies to answer records requests from the public and the media within 7 business days as opposed to the current 10 days. Police departments would be obligated to turn over the accused’s name and arrest charge within 24 hours, though they would have seven days to release the details of the alleged crime as provided in the narrative sections of the arrest report.

In his veto message, Carcieri argued that the law would have forced the release “of a vast amount of arrest information within a mere 24 hours after receipt of a request.” Among the information of concern, the governor said, was the “location of arrest.”

Public safety may be threatened if specific addresses are released, according to Carcieri, because the location may be the home or job of the victim or a witness.

Common Cause executive director Christine Lopes disputed the governor’s logic.

“There’s already provisions in the law to protect privacy and any investigative information,” she said. “An arrest is a public event. To arrest someone and to have that information hidden from the public is not what our country is based on.”

Meanwhile, the governor vetoed the “quash-and-destroy” bill, which was a high priority for the criminal defense lobby, prisoner-rights advocates and the minority community. They argued that a criminal record hampers people from getting jobs and in some cases, housing for which they might otherwise be qualified.

Rhode Island already has what the governor calls one of the most liberal expungement laws in the nation. It allows a judge to permanently seal the record of a nonviolent offense by a first-time offender five years after the individual has completed his or her sentence for a misdemeanor, 10 years after completion of a sentence for a felony.

The vetoed legislation would have gone much further.

It called for the automatic destruction of the record of any crime for which an admitted criminal has been given a “deferred” sentence, regardless of the nature of the crime and the age or criminal history of the offender as long as he or she stays out of trouble for five years.

In recent years, the kinds of criminals receiving such sentences included: accused stalkers, embezzlers, an admitted accomplice to a gunpoint robbery in Waterplace Park who traded testimony for a reduced sentence, one of the admitted coconspirators in the Lincoln bribery scandal and at least one child molester.

Carcieri raised many concerns in his veto message about creating “a special class” of rules for people who have to plead guilty or no-contest to a felony in order to qualify for a deferred sentence. For starters, he said it would “permit expungement for a violent felony… if the person serving a deferred sentence was of good behavior” for a period of time, that usually runs five years, and by so doing, make it impossible for employers — including the state itself — to do meaningful criminal background checks.

He noted that the legislation would allow “early expungement where the offense is one that would normally disqualify an individual from working as a child-care worker in a licensed child-care center, as a child-care provider in a private home and as a foster parent or adoptive parent.” Carcieri said he believes an employer should be able to consider the “deferred sentence pleas” of people applying for “such sensitive positions.”

If the governor’s veto stands, the new expungement law would not take effect.

Legislative leaders have not yet decided whether to hold a veto override session before their next scheduled meeting in January, according to spokesmen for the House and Senate. Veto overrides require a three-fifths majority of the members present and voting.

The Assembly held a veto override session last October, overriding close to three dozen of the 52 bills Carcieri had sought to kill.

The 36 bills the governor vetoed yesterday also include:

• A bill to create a study commission to investigate patients’ access to marijuana under Rhode Island’s medical marijuana act. Currently, many eligible patients are forced to buy the drug on the street.

The commission would have studied the creation of nonprofit “compassion centers” to distribute marijuana to those who qualify under current law. The bill was largely seen as a compromise, given that the Assembly considered and ultimately rejected a law to establish the “compassion centers” outright.

“The study commission… seeks to move Rhode Island further down the path of weakening the laws governing and public perception of illicit drugs,” Carcieri wrote in his veto message. “This study commission intends to create the roadmap for making the state a party to the manufacture, procession and distribution of a controlled substance.”

• The Rhode Island Foreclosed Property Upkeep Act, which requires that any financial institution that purchases a foreclosed property post a bond with the municipality for 25 percent of the property’s assessed value to correct any code violations if the owner fails to do so.

The measure included a requirement aimed at cracking down on scrap-metal dealers who buy copper pipes, which may have been stolen from foreclosed properties.“If this bill becomes law, it will adversely affect the housing market,” Carcieri wrote in his veto message. “I believe it is unfair to require an owner to post a bond simply because the potential exists for ‘neglecting’ the foreclosed property.”

kgregg@projo.com