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Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Courts - Can public records be "too public"?

Has the internet made public records too public? Should you have to dig -- make a trip to the courthouse in a distant county, or a number of trips around the countrry -- to assemble the public records on a specific subject? Here is an article from yesterday's Pittsburgh PostGazette, written by Caitlin Cleary, showing the split between advocates of pubic records, and those who think records can be "too public." (Thanks to How Appealing for the link.) Some quotes:

Be advised, say employment attorneys and privacy advocates: With new rules allowing the public instant online access to your Pennsylvania court records, that youthful indiscretion or mistaken arrest may no longer be relegated to dusty file folders in your county courthouse, forgotten and, for all practical purposes, invisible.

Instead, such information is just a few keystrokes away from any potential employer, landlord, or simply curious person with Internet access and a hankering to perform a do-it-yourself background check.

And even if the charges against you were later dropped, even if the arrest never led to a conviction, that legal snafu could come back to haunt you as you apply for jobs, housing or credit.

The online release of this pre-conviction information -- and the potential harm it poses to people who may have been charged with a crime but were never convicted -- is only one aspect of the state's new court records policy. But it was a stubborn point of criticism during the drafting of the new policy, and remains a major source of concern to groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. They argue that the potential for misuse, or even abuse, of the system is great.

"We believe that a fundamental principle of the American judicial system is 'innocent until proven guilty,' " said Larry Frankel, legislative director for the state ACLU. "One should not have to suffer the consequences of being mistakenly arrested. The dangers and the risks involved to a person who was incorrectly identified, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, can have consequences to their housing, employment, their status in the community."

The rules, which take effect Jan. 1, were developed by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts to govern which court records should be available to the public electronically over the Internet. Pre-conviction, or "police blotter" information has been public since 1980, available in hard copy for perusal at the courthouse, but the amount of effort a person had to exert to travel to the courthouse and pore through case files resulted in a kind of "practical obscurity."

The new policy represents a change not in what information is deemed public, but in the method of access to it.

From the end of the story:
The committee did not work in a vacuum in coming to this decision, said Mr. Heinz. They surveyed the 16 other state court systems and federal judiciary that provide electronic access to records, and found that 14 of the 16, plus the federal system, do allow the release of pre-conviction information.

Connecticut decided against it, in part because of youthful offenders whose paper court files eventually would become unavailable to the public based on the disposition of their cases. If they were on the Internet, those records could remain available.

According to the state court system, Minnesota's decision to withhold electronic pre-conviction data was based on "the fact that there is a high percentage of African-American citizens who are arrested for various crimes that result in a very low conviction rate." It was believed that making such information public would harm those who "will eventually be found not guilty of any crime." It is unclear how integrated the online Pennsylvania court records system is with popular Internet search engines. Mr. Heinz wasn't sure if a simple Google search of an individual's name would yield specific Web docket sheets, or a link to the portal for the Unified Judicial System of Pennsylvania.

He pointed out that pre-conviction information has been made available on the Pennsylvania Magisterial District Judge Automated System for the last 12 years with no reported problems.

Earlier this week we had entries on the retention of court records, in Kentucky and in Indiana. Today's issue deals with access to court records, covered in Indiana by Administrative Rule 9.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 19, 2006 09:44 AM
Posted to Courts in general