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Thursday, April 03, 2008

Ind. Courts - Yet more on the sealing of records in the Clerk of the Courts Office

Perhaps related to the total disappearance of some cases from the Clerk's docket, so that even the fact of their existence is no longer discernible, an attorney who recently visited the clerk's office sends this note this morning:

I saw your posts about the juvenile records, and realized that I had seen a notice on the cabinet where extra copies of briefs and motions are shelved awaiting pick up by attorneys who want file-stamped copies back.

The notice reads: "If you are looking for extra copies of a filing from a Juvenile matter (JV) please see a Case Manager for assistance. Those items will no longer be placed on this bookshelf for pick-up."

See this post from yesterday.

And to quote again from the ending of the original post on this topic yesterday:

The first time one of my cases was sealed, I called the Clerk's office to inquire and was told that one of the parties must have requested it. Uh, no. That would have required a filing of some sort, I would imagine. And as the attorney of record, I didn't receive anything.

I just checked one of my old TPR cases I did from earlier this year. Completely missing from the docket. No record found. Yet that case was not sealed the entire time I was progressing through the Court. And interestingly, the opinion issued and posted online used the parties' names (since they were adults) but changed the child's name to initials. Why would that case need to be sealed? Yet while searching for that TPR case, I found other TPR cases that were NOT sealed.

The ILB had a number of entries last year on the topic of secret dockets - i.e. court cases being kept off the public docket so that not even the fact of their existence is knowable. To review these entries, start with this post from Oct. 18, 2007. The examples, however, involve wrongful sealing by judicial order, not by administrative action.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 3, 2008 12:12 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts