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Sunday, October 09, 2005

Ind. Courts - Vanderburgh County plan to put records on line is stalled

The Evansville Courier & Press has a story today, by Bryan Corbin, reporting that efforts to post Vanderburgh County's court records online are on hold. Some quotes:

Officials have a plan, a software vendor and a cost estimate: up to $280,000. But they don't have the funding. The online court records project was not budgeted by the Vanderburgh County Council, and it remains on the back burner until financing materializes.

During Marsha Abell's two terms two terms as Vanderburgh County clerk, she advocated for the project. "I think definitely we should be online. I wanted to do that when I was clerk, but I never could get anybody to put it in the budget," Abell said. * * *

The [current] CourtView software provides the court's "minutes" (or official entries of what transpired in a case on particular dates) and offers printouts of the docket sheet for $1 a page. To obtain a court pleading or motion, people must go to the main county clerk's office, request the case file, and make copies - again, at $1 a page. * * *

If court docket sheets were posted online, citizens could search from home, though they might be charged a fee to download. No decision has been made on fees.

Vanderburgh Superior Court Judge J. Douglas Knight has helped spearhead the online-access effort. "It would be helpful in so many different ways," he said. Bankers, merchants, landlords and child-care centers all could use CourtView's search function to conduct background checks, he said.

Though nearly all county governments have Web sites, their court pages typically are limited to general information: blank marriage license and protective-order forms that can be downloaded. In counties such as Vanderburgh, Warrick, Gibson, Pike and Posey, records of individual court cases aren't yet online. Notable exceptions are courts in Tippecanoe and Lake counties.

This ILB entry from 10/6/05 reports on digitization projects in several other counties.

The Evansville C&P story today also reports on the stalled state court plan to link Indiana's local civil and criminal courts. That is somewhat old news, first reported in the Indianapolis Star on Sept. 26th (see ILB entries here and here.) However, today's C&P story ends with this:

With the state's completion date uncertain, does it make sense for Vanderburgh County to take the lead and post its own records online first? [Former Vanderburgh County clerk Marsha] Abell believes it does. "I wouldn't count on (the state) having this ready to go anytime soon," Abell said.
Meanwhile, a number of counties do have their records online. One private company involved in putting local court records online is Doxpop LLC in Richmond. On 9/30/05, Nick Fankhauser, the VP for Product Development at Doxpop, sent the ILB an e-mail that led to this informative ILB entry. Doxpop currently serves more than two dozen Indiana counties.

For those who are curious, it is possible to run some searches on the Doxpop site without registering: "You can use our court case search features to find basic information about open cases, or you can register to become a subscriber and access all available information about current and historical cases."

[More] Here is the Lake County online docket. Here is the link to the Tippecanoe County courts main page.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 9, 2005 01:35 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts