Recently in Judicial records Category

In his testimony today, a Luzerne County judge told a county commission that a kids-for-cash scheme (where two county judges allegedly sent kids to a jail in return for kickbacks) was able to go on for so long because the media does not report on juvenile proceedings.

It's an interesting thought. We don't cover or publish the names of minors charged with crimes unless there is an extenuating circumstance. Court proceedings for juveniles are typically closed.

Do you think juvenile court proceedings should be open to the public? Should the media report on it?

Original documents from state and federal governments, courts, schools and other agencies have a new home on the York Daily Record/Sunday News' Web site. Instead of residing on the Full Disclosure open records page, they now have their own page.

You can get to them one of two ways:

The 'Reading Room' link on the Full Disclosure page

or

go directly to the 'Reading Room' page.

The documents are now organized by topic, so they're easier for you to look through and find what you want. If you have suggestions on how to make the page even easier to navigate, let me know. I plan to add dates to each entry soon.

 If you have documents you'd like to share online, let me know and we can get them on 'Reading Room' -- and we'll give you credit for digging them out. If you have ideas for documents you think we should get from an agency and put online, let me know. And feel free to link to the page for quick access. 

Is your right to view court proceedings in jeopardy? I blogged earlier about a Georgia case in which the judge closed the courtroom because it wasn't big enough for the jury pool and the public.

Now, the New York Times reports that although "the press and the public have nearly an absolute constitutional right to attend jury selection in criminal cases" because of the efforts of a California newspaper, it is getting harder these days for newspapers to fight those battles.

"The days of powerful newspapers with ample legal budgets appear to be numbered," a public defender in Georgia, Gerard Kleinrock, wrote in a recent Supreme Court brief, according to the Times story. "Will underfunded bloggers be able to carry the financial burdens of opening our courtrooms?"

Read more at the link above.

Court records provide details on how the Brothers family farm, a 400-plus acre tract that was sold at auction last month, went under. It marked the end of a two-generation farm, although the buyer says he will keep farming the land.

The records don't answer all the questions, but you can piece together some of the story, as reporter Rick Lee did recently in this story and timeline, sourced through court records:

 The property bordering Bowers Bridge Road and the Conewago Creek was auctioned off for $1,704,300. A former dairy farm, it had not been used for agriculture since 1991.
 
   Edward Brothers Jr., who was deeded the land by his father, "Big" Edward Brothers Sr., in 1982 for $1, had operated a trucking company since 1962 when he was 18 years old.

    The trucking company, which began on the farm and moved to a Willows Springs Industrial Park terminal in 1998, had an apparently successful run.

    But for reasons not alluded to in court documents -- financial over-extension, a downturn in economics, ever-increasing operating costs -- the company began to founder around 2000.

    In 2003, Brothers Trucking Co. filed for Chapter 11 protection. More than 100 creditors filed claims against the company for almost $15.5 million.
  

Ryan Singel of Wired reports that a federal court spokesman says that RECAP, a Firefox plug-in that says it will help create free federal court documents (whereas you have to pay 8 cents a copy now on PACER), could make sealed court records viewable.

But one of the guys who wrote the code for the plug-in says that won't happen, because lawyers use a different program when they upload documents, and RECAP doesn't work with that program.

Read more at the link above.

A service that notifies people of the arrest, transfer or escape of county jail inmates will be online in York County Thursday, according to the county district attorney's office.

Law enforcement and other officials will officially announce Thursday that York County will be part of the Pennsylvania Statewide Automated Victim Information and Notification. It notifies crime victims, their families and members of the community with a phone call or e-mail with updates on county jail inmates.

Check the York Daily Record/Sunday News' web site Thursday for details.

... because you might be able to get those docs for free. Some people at Princeton University have unveiled a Firefox extension that aims to create a public repository of free federal/bankruptcy court records.* It's called RECAP -- which is PACER spelled backwards. PACER is the online court document retrieval service that charges 8 cents a page, with a ceiling of $2.40. (The records would be free if you were at the courthouse in person.)

The Princeton people say lawyers use PACER the most, but I know journalists use it regularly too. Not sure how many others use it, but if the RECAP project works, the result will be greater public access to public records -- and they'll be free. That's really how it's supposed to work.

The project already has a repository of free records. But it says that collection will grow because of how the extension works. If you're signed in to PACER, and you download (and pay for) documents in a case, those docs will be automatically uploaded to RECAP's free public collection. If you search for a case and the docs are in the free collection, you'll see a blue 'R' icon, which allows you to get those documents for free. Theoretically, everyone contributes, everyone benefits.

Some people are already flagging potential problems, such as, could documents be altered somehow on their way to the free collection. So it might be best to proceed with caution, at least at first. But this project is a promising development in public access to public records.

*thanks to @opengovva on twitter for the tip about RECAP.

Should courts be allowed to operate in private whenever they want? A defendant in a Georgia drug case wants the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Georgia Supreme Court's decision that it's OK for Georgia judges to bar the public from jury selection at will, without having to show special cause.

I'm summarizing a story by Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, which filed a brief urging the U.S. high court to review the decision.

The RCFP notes that the First and Sixth amendments to the U.S. Constitution create the presumption of public access to jury selection.

This country's judicial system was set up so that cases would be played out in the open, not behind closed doors (absent special cause), because only if the process is subject to scrutiny can we have the chance to make sure it's being done fairly. This is a case to keep an eye on.

The state Supreme Court has changed its tune on records it initially ordered destroyed. From the AP:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court now says it wants to preserve the records of thousands of juveniles who appeared before an allegedly corrupt judge between 2003 and 2008.

The high court had wanted to destroy the records. That would have prevented northeastern Pennsylvania juveniles from pursuing federal claims against the judge and kept secret the extent of his misconduct.

Attorneys asked a federal judge last week to order the preservation of more than 6,000 records as evidence in their lawsuit against former Judge Mark Ciavarella and others in Luzerne County.

The Supreme Court says it no longer objects to the records' preservation.

Prosecutors say Ciavarella took millions of dollars to put juvenile offenders in privately owned detention centers.

Perhaps you missed this nugget in the deluge of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings ... or perhaps you weren't watching or reading at all ... but anyway, the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press picked out of a transcript that Sotomayor isn't opposed to cameras in the courtroom and would join the discussion among Supreme Court justices about whether to permit cameras there.

More here.