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Report: Access to public records in Virginia courts
courthousenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from courthousenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Penobscot County (Maine) Courthouse. (Courthouse News via Wikipedia)
A contract is kind of like a book in that you can understand the story if you read it carefully.
In Maine the court bureaucracy is hiding behind a contract with a vendor that is onerous indeed, and should serve as a lesson to other state courts. I keep bringing it up in Maine because the judiciary’s deal is so bad. Public servants are getting into bed with a huge and highly profitable company and they are being abused.
One of our bureau chiefs, Adam Angione in New York, has long been designated as our special projects editor, which primarily meant staying ahead of the ongoing technological changes in the courts.
Art by Carlos Ayala
When a state court clerk teams up with a private vendor to exploit the public record, it all looks good at the beginning. The clerk will make a bundle and the vendor will make out too.
But really, one of them is the patsy.
We at Courthouse News have lately been looking at Texas where clerks are fighting against press access like a dog guarding a bone. They surely make some extra money selling court records, but the state is getting taken to the cleaners.
Courthouse News bureau chief Adam Angione has been looking at the yearly sums paid by the people of Texas to its home state corporation Tyler Technologies, capitalized at $13 billion.
The Penobscot County (Maine) Courthouse. (Courthouse News via Wikipedia)
(CN) A cult-like adherence to the notion of “practical obscurity” for electronic court records is dead. Or is it.
In black and white, Maine’s new restriction on access to electronic court records exposes the tarnished bones of an old battle. It is the most blatant example yet of an American court walking forward on technology and in synchronous motion walking backward on transparency.
A court committee itself operating in secrecy put a new rule in place in December that says nobody can look at electronic court records until three days after they are served. Asked by a reporter how long the blackout period runs, the counter clerk in Penobscot Superior Court in Bangor said, “Ninety days.”
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