A unified court system index in California is a futuristic dream but IF we had an index that provided date of birth for the defendant then we wouldn’t have to depend on the overworked clerks to search their computer record or to retrieve files just to confirm an accurate identification. Court record research company, Baxter Research, sends its clients court alerts. Here’s a recent one reporting the difficulties in the San Bernardino court.

Anyone seeking to obtain criminal record information from the county of San Bernardino, CA should be aware of the following circumstances.

The public access index has no ID. All possible records are initially name-match-only and must be verified for ID via the clerks. The clerk’s system has ID and the clerks verify ID (provided to them) as “match” or “no match”.

Consequently, any request that results in possible cases entails a potential liability of the court itself returning false positive and negative ID verification in San Bernardino.

We make every effort to ensure ID is correctly verified as match or no match. We query any clerk at the first sign of uncertainty and resubmit search request’s to an alternative clerk wherever possible. However, it is not possible to view the clerk’s computer and we must take the word of the clerks.

The courts do a respectable job coping with the heavy demand for identifier verification but they do occasionally make mistakes and report records that do not belong to the subject of inquiry or eliminate cases as “no match” for cases that do belong to the subject.