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Friday, August 26, 2011
Courts - "Millions of US court records bound for shredder"
Michael Tarm of the AP has a very long story today on the plans of U.S. officials "to destroy millions of paper federal court records to save on storage costs, a plan that has raised the ire of some historians, private detectives and others." They say they would be too costly to digitize. Some quotes:
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration says at least 10 million bankruptcy case files and several million district court files from 1970 through 1995 will be shredded, pounded to pulp and recycled. Files designated as historically valuable, however, will be kept in storage.Federal archivists spent years consulting legal scholars, historians and others about which files to purge after realizing that sorting and digitizing just the bankruptcy cases would cost tens of millions of dollars. None of the civil or criminal cases up for destruction went to trial, and docket sheets that list basic information such as names of defendants and plaintiffs will be saved from each case.
Such reassurances haven't allayed concerns of some of those whose work relies on the paper documents.
Cornell Law School professor Theodore Eisenberg said it's precisely the mundane, every day records with no clear historical significance that, when looked at as a whole, are critical to establishing legal trends upon which court policy is often based.
"Something really important will be lost here," said Eisenberg, a former clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court for the late Justice Earl Warren. "We would lose any ability to assess trends over time. This is not just a matter of history, it is a matter of influencing basic policy today." * * *
Historians argue that it is impossible to say what records will be historically significant in 10, 50 or 100 years, since a file deemed inconsequential today might one day shed light on someone who emerges to prominence, from a presidential candidate to a murder suspect.
Beyond scholars, among those concerned is Don Haworth, a 35-year veteran private investigator in Chicago who said he frequently uses those same 1970-95 federal records. In his work, the slightest clue in the seemingly most mundane records could make or break a case.
He said that applies to run-of-the-mill bankruptcy records that could show a pattern of a businessman over a 30- or 40-year period of opening a business, then declaring bankruptcy and jilting creditors. He recently found that a target of his investigation lied when she said she'd never been involved in a federal case: She showed up as a witness in a federal case decades ago.
"While a record may not be pertinent to one individual, they may be a gold mine to others," Haworth said.
He also runs into other private investigators, scholars, historians and even writers doing research at Chicago's Federal Records Center, which houses records from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 26, 2011 09:59 AM
Posted to Courts in general