IN FEBRUARY 1999, a Greenville woman filed suit against the state Department of Public Safety and Image Data, alleging they had violated her right to privacy when the agency sold her driver's license information (including her photo) to the private company, which was putting together a system to combat check fraud.

The next month, DPS terminated its contract with Image Data and requested that the company purge all S.C. records from its database; there is nothing to suggest that this was not accomplished.

Case closed, victory declared, right? Wrong.

The case dragged on until 2002, when Circuit Court Judge Casey Manning threw it out. But the "injured" plaintiff was not satisfied; she appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week wisely and unanimously decided that Judge Manning was absolutely right. The woman had not been injured, in part because state law at the time specifically made everything on her driver's license public information.

We might add that even if she had been injured, any injury was cured by the termination of the contract. But some people just like to clog up our courts with meritless lawsuits. Our courts will continue to struggle with horrendous backlogs until judges start assessing penalties for such frivolous abuse of our judicial system.