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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Ind. Decisions - Improvements needed to highlight late-added opinions

Late this afternoon, another COA opinion was posted by the Clerk; the stamp indicates it was filed at 3:40 pm. The NFP case is Mitchell Jackson v. State of Indiana (NFP).

Only by accident did the ILB discover this, noticing that the count from earlier in the day, 15, had now increased to 16. To determine which of the list of 16 was new, the ILB had to tediously compare the old list against the new list. As one can see from looking at the list of postings, the newly added Jackson falls in the middle of the 8/6/08 postings.

I have no idea how often this happens and goes undiscovered. The last time the ILB spotted one of these late-added opinions was June 5th: "[Note: This opinion was posted after the regular posting; as the ILB has stressed before, there is always the danger that additional opinions added later in the day with no designation as such will not be spotted.]"

The ILB has written about this issue several times. This ILB entry from Dec. 12, 2007 is headed "Suggestions to improve COA postings:"

Readers will notice there are two sets of Court of Appeals decisions this afternoon. When the ILB checked at noontime, there were a number of opinions dated 12/12/07, which the ILB duly posted with summaries. A few minutes ago the ILB checked the COA site again, and it appeared that more cases dated 12/12/07 had been added.

The problem is, there is no easy way, from the way the COA site is set up, to distinguish between additions to the list, other than by date. When additional cases are added in the same day, they are intermingled with the cases already posted, rather than being added to the top or bottom of the list, or otherwise identified.

Someone looking at the list at the wrong time of a day may miss important opinions and not realize it, or may look a second time and see that the list for the day looks longer, but have to open each opinion again to see which ones are new.

The ILB has corresponded with a COA representative about this problem twice, suggesting possible resolutions. Here is the message, sent Sept. 7th and Oct. 26th:

Here [are] two small things the Court of Appeals could do to improve its reporting of opinions on the court website.

Most days it appears that the opinions go to the clerk for posting in batches. What that means is that when the public checks the site it can tell all the cases posted for a certain date, but it cannot distinguish between what was added first thing in the morning and what was added later. So, especially on busy days, if you look at 10 there is a long list of cases, and if you look at 2 the list may be even longer, but no way to determine what has been newly added.

This could be easily remedied by, for instance, having DP somehow separate this first batch from the second, rather than intermingling them.

A second improvement, that I suggested to the Clerk's office several years ago, has to do with corrected opinions. It appears that when an opinion is corrected for typos, etc. a new version is posted in place of the old with nothing said. So different people may be reading different versions, depending on when they accessed the opinion. Why not append a correction sheet to the revised version?

These small improvements would be very simple to implement and would benefit the many people who access the opinions each day. Perhaps others will add their voices.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 6, 2008 06:58 PM
Posted to Ind. App.Ct. Decisions