Archive for the ‘Maryland’ Category

Many state appeals and supreme courts post their decisions at their Web sites and will deliver newly issued opinions, some with captions and summaries, to you by email or syndication. Look at your state’s court site to determine if it offers a notification service.

The Iowa Court of Appeals offers email notification of “supreme court opinions, court of appeals opinions, press releases and orders.” Conversely, the New Jersey judiciary Web site posts opinions and calendars of upcoming decisions but doesn’t have a built-in notification. In this case, I use the low-cost service, WatchThatPage, which sends me the new content whenever this Web site is updated. I receive case summaries that look like this.

A-52-05 State v. Saleem Crawley (58,340)
Where police officers, in response to an anonymous tip about criminal activity, requested defendant to stop and answer some questions because he matched the description provided in the tip, can defendant be found guilty of obstruction for running away? Certification granted: 10/12/2005
Argued: 2/15/06
Decided: 7/24/06

I can then go to the court site to read the full opinion. Rutgers Law library has constructed an RSS feed for New Jersey appeals and tax cases.

Even better, the Utah Appellate Court provides real-time delivery of court opinions by RSS, a free means of receiving updated content from user selected sites. The RSS program I like is Bloglines. Here you can collect and read all your dynamically refreshed content at one Web site.

Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Nevada and Maryland all distribute court opinions by RSS. The U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals’ opinions are also syndicated.

The Maryland Judiciary Rules Committee will consider a proposal to deny public access to electronic or paper files that have personal identifiers. The proposal, if accepted will amend the Maryland Rules of Procedure pertaining to court records access, specifically Rule 16-1007, Required Denial of Inspection – Specific Information In Case Records.

The proposal, on the Rules Committee Agenda for this Friday, June 23, would allow a criminal case victim or witness to shield their personal information without the necessity of a hearing. Personal information that would be blocked from public inspection is the victim/witness name, address, telephone number, date of birth, e-mail address, and place of employment..

The Federal Trade Commission, with assistance from the major cell phone carriers, has filed civil suits in 5 federal jurisdictions against resellers of telephone call records, seeking to bar them from this activity and to press them to deliver, to the federal government, any profits they’ve obtained.

U.S. District Court, Central District of California, Federal Trade Commission v. 77 INVESTIGATIONS, INC., and REGINALD KIMBRO:

The FTC brings this action pursuant to Section 13(b) of l9 the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC net’), 15 U.S.C. S 53(b), to secure permanent injunctive relief, rescission of contracts,
2211 restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and other equitable relief against Defendants for violations of Section 23 24 II S(a) of the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. § aS(a), in connection with surreptitiously obtaining and selling confidential customer phone records without the customer knowledge or authorization.

Read the FTC press release and all case complaints.

Last month I detailed the changes to the Maryland court records index that affects the public information that will be available by electronic access. The Court of Appeals issued its final Order, which will go into effect this summer. AP did a short recap.

In a nod to the start of National Sunshine Week, the Maryland Court of Appeals has settled the issue of electronic access to state court records – in favor of the presumption of openness. Statewide access to the index of civil and criminal cases is available in all but two counties. Read the rest of this entry »