Private Investigator Public Records Internet Search Privacy Reporting - PI Buzz

Those who research historical records - as I do for Quiet Title actions, family history and heir locates - will find the new California Voter Registrations - 1900-1968, supplied by Ancestry.com very helpful. You can search a name for free, but a subscription is required to view an image of the record.

The State of Connecticut Judicial Branch, Conviction & Bond Forfeiture Dispositions Criminal/Motor Vehicle database supplements the Pending Criminal Cases search.

The holdings and limitations are described at the site.

# Each Criminal And Motor Vehicle Charge Disposed On And After January 1, 2000 In Which The Court Disposition Was A Conviction Is Included

# Each Criminal And Motor Vehicle Charge In Which The Court Action Was Concluded By A Bond Forfeiture Order On And After January 1, 2000 Is Included

* A Motor Vehicle Matter Disposed By Way Of Bond Forfeiture Is Deemed A Conviction Pursuant To Connecticut General Statutes Section 14-1(a)(18)

# Youthful Offender And Juvenile Cases Are Not Displayed

# This Criminal History Record Information May Change Daily Due To Erasures, Corrections, Pardons, And Other Modifications To Individual Criminal History Record Information.

Identify civil surgeons who have been designated by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services to perform medical exams on applicants. Search by state or zip code. Or search by name from a search engine with the query: name site:uscis.gov. Replace the word name with the personal name.

Find criminal and administrative actions against doctors at the Drug Enforcement Administration, Diversion Control Program site. A search by last name or year returns name, location, date of arrest, conviction result, DEA registration status and a case summary. This database goes back to 2003. Search older registrant actions from a search engine with the query: name site:www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/.

I was setting out to write about state lookup and registration of “Do Not Call” and “No Call” phone numbers. More on this in a moment. I’m diverging to mention a few voter registration lookup links. The Federal Voting Assistance Program, U.S. Department of Defense collects links to State Voter Registration Verification Web sites. The participating states provide this service for residents to confirm their voter registration status. The sites may variously require a name, date of birth, street number or address to verify whether the individual is registered to vote.

A few non governmental sites that collect links to public records have a category dedicated to voter records. Black Book Online has 63 links to city, county or state government voter registration lookup. Search Systems has some additional links, but there are variations in both collections. And neither has Southington, Connecticut Voter Registration Lookup included. Imagine that! Read my prior posts on voter registration verification.

Okay, on to Do-Not-Call phone lookup sites. The Tennessee Do-Not-Call Citizen Registration Lookup returns a street number match to the provided telephone number. The Missouri Registration Lookup for No Call List verifies whether a phone number is on the list and the date it was registered.

Do you know of other voter confirmation or Do-Not-Call registration sites?

Some states, counties and towns list current registered voters on a Web site. But you might also look for databases and PDF files that voter registrars and town clerks compile of formerly registered voters. States and local agencies variously refer to these non current registered voters lists as purged, inactive or excluded. Use advanced search operators at a search engine to search by different phrases, file types and site domains to identify inactive voters lists. Here are a few I found.

Darien, Connecticut roll of inactive voters.

Voter Purge List, Madison County, Alabama residents.

City of St. Louis Inactive Voters List.

Knox County, Tennessee Purged Inactive Voters is available as of 2005.

Inactive Voter Status - Barnstable, Massachusetts

And, just to remind us that easy come, easy go…In 2000, People for the American Way published a Central Voter File Exclusions List of registered voters Florida planned to purge from the rolls as purported felons. The list was never used and People for the American Way has since removed it from their server.

The online telephone directory, 411.com isn’t just for finding listed telephone numbers. Use it to identify current employment or to expand the employment history profile of your subject. A search on my name in California returned 40 results. Some are home listings, but other records are work contacts. These are extracted from the Internet - Web pages and Zoominfo - and may supplement the business associations found at various other people finder sites.

Google the work designation “Mt Diablo Soccer League” to find a photo, phone number and email for this Tamara Thompson.

Most of the free lookup, fee-based people finder sites - PeopleFinders, Voompeople, Privateeye, to name a few, - contain the same data, although those may list corporation and DBA records not found at 411.com.

The recent proposal by the governor of Connecticut requiring that these sites offer a blanket opt-out to residents likely won’t get legal traction. The Internet people finder databases and telephone directories already have opt-out procedures, and their information is gathered from government public records and published directories. Governor Rell has stated that this measure would address safety concerns for the elderly, who are often targeted in financial scams.

Nevada Supreme Court Schedules Public Hearing on Proposed Rules to Govern Sealing and Redacting of Court Records in Civil Cases.

Names of those arrested and detained in an immigration raid must be disclosed, as ordered by the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission. Documents were retained by the state’s Department of Public Safety, which made them subject to disclosure under the Connecticut open records law .

Washington State DOC to Seek Public Input in Development of New Electronic Disclosure Rules.

A Florida judge overruled a local school board in determining that the names of all school employees enrolled in the deferred retirement plan must be released under the state’s public records law.

Next month, Connecticut will remove “information identifying a party protected by a restraining order” from its Web site case lookup. This move is in response to a 2006 federal law prohibiting the disclosure of the identity of victims of domestic violence. In every county, this information will still be available in the county court case files.

Under a 2006 amendment to the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2005, no state, Indian tribe of territory “shall make available publicly on the Internet any information regarding the registration or filing of a protection order, restraining order, or injunction in either the issuing or enforcing State, tribal, or territorial jurisdiction, if such publication would be likely to publicly reveal the identity or location of the party protected under such order.”

I wonder if this mandate will impede efforts to identify restrained parties, such as San Diego County does in its unique database.

The State of Connecticut Judicial Branch is reviewing family law cases that were sealed before 2003 to determine which are eligible for a change in status, then publishing the list of cases. The court outlines its objective.

The plan calls for a review to determine: (1) whether the cases were properly designated as sealed; (2) whether the docket sheets, which set forth the chronology of the case, may be displayed on the Judicial Branch website; and (3) whether the motions and orders to seal the file may be made publicly available. At this point, there are approximately 500 of these cases statewide. Certain cases that have unique issues, including files that are unavailable pursuant to Practice Book Section 7-10, are not included in this phase of the review process, but those files will be addressed in a subsequent phase.

Teacher disciplinary actions finalized in 2007 are now at the Web site for the Florida Department of Education, Bureau of Professional Practices.

An Illinois appeals court ruled that employment contracts of state employees are public records.
Read the story
Read the case opinion, Jerry Reppert And The Gazette Democrat V. Southern Illinois University And Walter V. Wendler.

A Monterey County, California advocacy organization has appealed a ruling by a county judge who supported Monterey County’s denial of a public records request related to pending litigation. The organization wants to know how much money the county spending on land use litigation.

The Los Angeles County Superior Court has ruled that church personnel files of priests accused of molesting children may be released to the public, whether or not there was a criminal prosecution. The decision affects a small number of clergy but tips the balance in favor of the public right to know over privacy, which could affect many other cases.

Santa Clara County, California is continuing to fight a Superior Court determination that its GIS mapping should be easily available to the public at low cost. Meanwhile, Greenwich, Connecticut has assented to that state’s Supreme Court ruling and will post aerial photographs of the town on its Web site. Both government agencies used the specious defense that freely available geographic information systems maps were a security risk.

Folks in North Carolina may want to comment at the blog of a county Register who removed vital records from the Internet, then wrote about it.

The state police can demand lists of email activity conducted by a business if they deem it relevant to an investigation, according to an opinion by the Nebraska Attorney General. This includes “non content” records retained by providers of electronic communication services, such as ISP records of email headers, but not the email message.

Search the New York local civil court records by index number, party name, attorney/firm or judge. Some courts are online now and others will be added through the year.

Appeals filed with the Minnesota Supreme Court and the Minnesota Court of Appeals are now searchable online. More extensive information is available for cases filed after March 2003.

Connecticut criminal court dockets are online but only show the current day’s session. Search by court location or defendant to receive defendant status and charges. A search of criminal convictions is expected to be added within 6 months.

Not to be confused with the Connecticut Judicial Branch Task Force on Public Access, Governor Rell’s Commission on Judicial Reform has issued its final report. The Commission made recommendations on broadcast coverage of court proceedings and proposed opening “juvenile proceedings concerning abused, neglected, uncared for, and dependent children, and proceedings concerning the termination of parental rights.”

The Kansas legislature will entertain a bill to add those convicted of meth offences to a statewide registry.

Public libraries are a free source of periodicals and proprietary databases, many of which can be searched remotely. In Questions? - Answers from the Internet I included links to a list of public library Web sites and a real-time research librarian service. There are also online reference sites for specific regions. If you have a Connecticut library card you can make use of the 24/7 infoAnyTime, an online chat tool that connects you to a reference librarian. An added benefit of infoAnyTime is real-time Web co-browsing, enabling a researcher to guide you through your Internet search.

See a list of many of the virtual reference services available in the United States and internationally.

Legal journals and genealogical databases are a few of the many computerized resources offered by public libraries.

The Connecticut Supreme Court Public Access Task Force report recommends that the criminal index and case dockets be made available online. This action would require a change in state law, according to a Journal Inquirer article.

The Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics of the New Jersey Supreme Court has issued an opinion that clarifies the role an attorney can assume who is also an active law enforcement officer.

The Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics considered an inquiry regarding the propriety of a municipal police officer who is an attorney affiliating with a law firm located in a municipality bordering that in which he serves as police officer. It concluded that RPC 1.7 prohibits the inquirer from representing a criminal defendant in certain matters. The Committee further concluded that, under RPC 1.8(k) and the rationale of the New Jersey Supreme Court in State v. Clark, 162 N.J. 201 (2000), the inquirer may not represent any criminal defendant in Superior Court matters in the same county as the municipality in which he serves.

State legislative research offices answer legislators’ questions and provide bill analysis, generating topical reports. These reports can include summaries of state laws that otherwise would take a researcher hours to compile. In June 2006, the Connecticut Office of Legislative Research produced, Public Access to Court Proceedings and Records, a one page response to the legislature’s request “for state laws that permit or require courts to prohibit public access to court records or proceedings.” The response categorizes the state laws that require court records or court proceedings be keep confidential.

The California Senate Office of Research reports are searchable online by keyword or year. The only report issued this year, on privacy, provides a wide ranging summary, with code citations, of laws related to identity theft, confidential court records, financial privacy, telephone subscriber records and surveillance technology, to name a few areas. This is a convenient reference document for every California investigator, and reporter writing about political and social issues.

The newly formed Connecticut Judicial Branch Public Access Task Force is holding public meetings as it considers the scope of current access to court records and the future of electronic access. Senior Associate Justice David M. Borden charged the committee to consider the ramifications of online access to court records, at the May 25 opening meeting.

Transparency and openness must always be balanced against other legitimate interests, such as legitimate expectations of privacy, legitimate concerns for security, and legitimate needs of confidentiality. To take just one example, which we in the Branch will have to face in the not too distant future, consider the fact that open, on-line access to all electronically filed judicial records may mean–in, say, credit card collection cases–open, on-line access to private individuals’ social security numbers, dates of birth, credit card numbers, and even bank
account numbers and related information. That would increase dramatically the
risk of judicial records being a ready vehicle for identity theft.

The schedule of future meetings can be obtained by contacting the Supreme Court, 231 Capitol Ave., Hartford; 860-757-2270.

Judicial Access Panel Gets To Work reported in courant.com

A few months ago I wrote about the removal of thousands of court cases from state and federal court dockets. Although the use of private courts is ensconced in the California Constitution, the proceedings are public records, but there is no court docket index, therefore limited means to track these cases.

The AP further developed this story in a report, Wealthy turning to retired jurists as alternative to court, pointing out that, since private court rulings can be appealed, it is often only in the appellate courts these cases come to light.

Under California law, the parties to a lawsuit can agree to hire a private judge who, unlike those paid to act as mediators or arbitrators, issue rulings that can be appealed.

Such cases are still subject to the same public access requirements of trials held in court, but often many of them prove difficult to track. Proceedings are held in private offices and documents don’t always make it into the public record.

Two high-profile divorce cases - one involving Michael Jackson, the other supermarket magnate Ronald Burkle - has helped reignite the debate over private judges after the media was denied access to proceedings and case files.

Connecticut Governor Rell has announced the formation of a commission to explore judicial proceedures related to private courts, prompted by a court scandal linking court secrecy to potential abuses and conflicts in court operations.

The Future Trends In State Courts 2005, Developments In Private Judging—The California Experience, discusses the increasing inclination of litigants to move trials outside of the state court system, but the author never directly addresses the issue of invisible dockets.

Indeed, the private judge is required by the California Rules of Court to allow the press, as well as members of the public, to attend, unless the law would otherwise allow the proceedings to be sealed if held in a state court. As a practical matter, this issue only arises when the pending matter has some appeal to the press or a specific group.

A Connecticut Supreme Court decision upheld a lower court’s determination that certain court case files are not public records. The lopsided ruling is expected to draw fire from some legislators who vow to consider this loophole in the public records law in the current legislative session.

The court ruled 4-3 in favor of Judicial Branch officials and the Meriden Superior Court clerk, who had rejected requests by attorney Russell Collins in 2002 to view documents and related files stored in the branch’s computer system.

Those items _ called the daybook and pending book _ provide information such as a defendant’s name and birth date, pending court dates and whether he or she is incarcerated.

Legislative action to open the original birth certificates of adoptees is making its way through the Connecticut General Assembly. The bill, An Act Providing Adult Adopted Persons with Access to Information in Original Birth Certificates, would make the birth records available to the adoptee and to approved researchers. Maybe investigators or genealogists in Connecticut could comment on the requirements to be an approved party.