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The Unified Judicial System of Pennsylvania is formulating new policies regarding public access to court case files. The Notice from the court highlights the proposed removal of Social Security numbers and bank account numbers from future court files. The public can submit comments by email, which are due by May 28, 2008.

The New Jersey Supreme Court Committee on Public Access to Court Records recently solicited comments on its proposed policy changes. Read the submitted comments and the report on policy changes.

An Opinion issued by the North Dakota Attorney General confirms that email messages from government employees “acting within the scope of their public positions” are public records “regardless of whether it is located at their private homes or businesses.”

Last year, I wrote about a similar determination by the Idaho Supreme Court and the Arkansas Supreme Court. The courts, not the government entity, must determine whether public employees’ emails are private, according to the Arizona Supreme Court.

Read a recent round-up of other state court decisions: Are public employee e-mails secret?, The Des Moines Register, March 18, 2008.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press tracks public records news. Subscribe by email or RSS.

The California Franchise Tax Board list of delinquent taxpayers (or should-be taxpayers) extends back to 1987.

“California Revenue & Taxation Code Section 19195 directs the Franchise Tax Board to publish an annual list of the top 250 taxpayers with liened state income tax delinquencies greater than $100,000.”

Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Mexico and New Jersey are among the states that are currently listing delinquent taxpayers, although some of these are just the top 100 taxpayers who owe the most.

Select a state Department of Revenue to locate other delinquent taxpayers lists.

The online versions of mainstream newspapers continue to distinguish themselves by collecting public records, then making them searchable in a database. I mentioned two sites in a posting last week - DataUniverse (New Jersey) and DataCentral (Iowa). The Boston Herald is doing its part to sunshine the workings of the Massachusetts state government in a database identified as the 2007 State Employee Payroll. This database is unique in collecting public records from the government and making them easily accessible to the public, in a form not otherwise available. Search by partial last name or agency, or combine the two. A search identifies the department, the employee’s name, the job description, weekly hours and annual rate of pay. [Via Media Nation]

The Tennessee Leaf-Chronicle isn’t giving us a unique database but it is linking to some of the public records online databases at the government Web sites.

The Honolulu Advertiser’s Boating Safety Searchable Database is drawn from Coast Guard accident reports. Not all states are included and the site has few details on the extent of the data and the compiling process. Some document images of accident reports are here. The newspaper also has links to selective public records databases hosted at government sites.

Search high school graduates, government salaried employees and high school athletes for selective counties and municipalities in Kentucky and Indiana, at the Courier-Journal DataCenter. Plot property transfers in Jefferson County, Kentucky on a map. Search by street or zip code and sort by date, address or sales price.

Death Notices, building permits and smoking complaints are among the databases collected at this Cincinnati, Ohio paper.

Search Indiana state employee salaries by name and the Indiana Attorney General consumer litigation by company name. Indiana State Police speeding violations are searchable by name or location for the past 6 months.

The Des Moines Register has a variety of types of personal information databases that it has assembled from Iowa state government records. Court fines and business executive salaries are available statewide. Vital records indexes, property transfers, high school graduates and bankruptcies for Polk County can be searched by partial name. Records are indexed for 2007 only.

Check your area Gannett newspaper for their public records databases and public records directories.
[Thanks to Mark Schaver at Depth Reporting for many of these links.]

The New Jersey online inmate status service on the VINELink database has expanded from covering just county level facilities to Department of Corrections and the State Parole Board. A search at VINELink returns current and former inmates, the controlling agency or facility, the offender’s custody status -whether in or out of custody or under unsupervised custody- and if the offender is out of custody because of a court order, sentence was served, he’s paroled, living at a half-way house or released to his own recognizance. Surprisingly, if the offender’s status has changed due to escape, this is also noted. The inmate number, date of birth, gender, race and alias are listed. Telephone notification is an additional feature.

The New Jersey VINE gathers offender information from New Jersey’s County Jails, the New Jersey Department of Correction, New Jersey Juvenile Justice Commission and the New Jersey Parole Board, according to the New Jersey attorney General.

It doesn’t do researchers much good when we discover that personal information databases are taken off the Internet, as recently occurred with the Colorado Marriage and Divorce Index, reported at LegalDockets Online. Especially if there aren’t good alternatives. The Colorado State Archive has a limited statewide marriage and divorce index at the Archives, only through 1939.

The Jefferson County, Colorado Sheriff Crime Mapping database retrieves crime incidents over the past year for the unincorporated areas. Search by parcel number or address.

You never know when a marginal public records database, such as Virginia Freshwater Fish Citations, may break a case, right? Search by name and find where the guy was and the date of the catch.

The statewide New Jersey Property Owner Search at the Asbury Park Press has been updated.

Caddo Parrish, Louisiana Prisoners In Jail database, with case information and booking photos, is online. View in IE.

This isn’t a free divorce index, but for those who are subscribers to VitalSearch you can now search the Nevada Divorce Index, covering 1967-2005.

The New Jersey Courier-Post has added statewide New Jersey Superior Court Criminal Conviction Records to its collection of public records databases, called DataUniverse. The collection of DataUniverse databases include some private investigators frequently use: New Jersey Death Index, Department of Corrections inmates, real property ownership, state employees and disciplinary records of doctors. As always, check the source material, don’t assume these records are inclusive or accurate.

Media organizations have charged ahead developing databases of public records, often of indexes and documents the government has not released or developed. The Florida Herald Tribune Teacher Misconduct Database is built from court records and administrative complaints filed with the Education Practices Commission against teachers for various types of misconduct. Searchable by name or location, the site returns a summary of the matter and copies of documents. The data covers 1997 - 2005. The state is scrambling to develop its own online database, a good outcome of the Herald Tribune project. The Florida government site may be available sometime in 2007.

Reported in Lucas Grindley.

Query the Municipal Codes that are online for each city or county at the LexisNexis Municipal Code Web Library. Other jurisdictions may be found at General Code. If you don’t find the town you’re looking for at one of these sites, check the jurisdiction’s main Web site. To find the Municipal Code for Beverly Hills put the phrase “Beverly Hills Municipal Code” in your Web address search bar and you’ll be taken directly to the site that best matches your phrase. The General Code Publishers’ newsletter collects some changes in state laws by topic. A recent issue covered changes in ordinances in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida and New York related to residency restrictions for registered sex offenders.

A new player in the very active online real estate listings competition is PropertyShark, which, unlike Zillow, provides the current owner at an address, and also customizes demographic maps for the geographical region of an address.

At the Zillow site you can look for real property valuations and aerial photographs by property address. It covers many more cities than does PropertyShark but the tools at this site are a unique supplement to the other property listing and mapping Web sites.

A PropertyShark search by address (after free registration) returned a profile with the current ownership, last deed transfer, demographic maps, building permits, neighbors and nearby property sales. Coverage is strongest in New York, particularly Manhattan, for which there are photographs of properties, but take a look at all the site features. Cities in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Washington, Oregon and California are currently included.

Map your life in Los Angeles and plot crime and property sales within the circumference of a specific address.

The New Jersey Judiciary Web site posts a list of “attorneys who have not complied with the mandatory IOLTA program” and are therefore ineligible to practice law. According to this notice issued by the New Jersey Supreme Court lawyers remain on the list until they comply. It’s an extensive collection of names.

The California State Bar pamphlet, What Should I Know If I Am Arrested?, provides very basic information on rights and procedures in the arrest process. The counsel, “If you are arrested for a crime, particularly a serious one, you should contact a lawyer as soon as possible”, is not hard hitting, and the document is unlikely to get into the hands of the ones who need it before the hammer falls. But maybe you could pass it along to defendants so they’re better prepared for the next arrest.

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.

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 U.S. Department of Education Web site provides links to each state’s Department of Education, and to private sites that have education related tools. Locate school names and addresses at the Standard and Poors site, SchoolMatters. Search by school or district name, city, state or zip code.

The National Center for Education Statistics has a school locator that includes colleges and public libraries. View school districts and plot Census demographics from 1990 and 2000 on state maps.

Some state Department of Education Web sites include a personnel directory. The New Mexico directory, which can be downloaded, lists schools and districts alphabetically.

The Michigan Department of Education has a Teacher Certification Verification database.

Find the status of a Teacher Certification application in Pennsylvania or New Jersey by SSN.

The New Jersey Superior Court has determined that public access to court procedings and court records supercedes any agreement by the litigants to keep records confidential. The trial court judge claimed that opening the court records could injure the parties’ reputations, but the appellate court disagreed saying, openness trumpted any contractual agreement.

Intervenors American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., North Jersey Media Group, Inc., and Bloomberg News L.P. (the media) challenge the Law Division’s August 7, 2003 order that sealed virtually all pleadings and documents filed with the court and barred the public from access to the court proceedings based upon confidentiality agreements among private parties. We conclude that the parties’ contractual agreements do not outweigh the presumption of openness that applies to court proceedings and filed documents. Accordingly, we reverse and vacate the sealing orders.

Read the article Read the opinion