In the best news of the weekend, South Dakota’s courts are going to make court documents available online!
Right now when I want to look up a court case online, there is one computer in all of Brown County where I can do so, on the second floor of the unnecessarily locked-down Brown County Courthouse. To reach this computer, I must submit to a warrantless search. I must then wait for Elisa Sand or some other intrepid reporter to get done on the computer. Once I get my hands on the computer, I can only search cases by case number. This sole court-lookup computer offers no search capability and no browsable listing of cases by name or number.
And this computer is available to the public only during business hours, meaning that if I’m working 8 to 5, Monday through Friday, I need to take lunch or vacation time to access court documents. The situation is worse for citizens all over the state who may not live in their county seat, the only place in each county where a public court-lookup computer is available.
Finally recognizing the unjustness of keeping public documents so inaccessible, the Unified Justice System is prepping a system modeled on the federal Public Access to Court Electronic Records to let all of us access South Dakota court documents from any web-browsing device:
…the UJS is currently piloting a program that will eventually allow the public to see records from any computer, said Greg Sattizahn, administrator of the South Dakota Unified Judicial System. The website will be similar to the PACER website, which lets people view and download federal court records for a fee.
We recognize that the (computer) terminals are kind of limited in their functionality,” he said.
Lawyers can currently view documents related to their cases on any computer for free and on the new website, Sattizahn said. The new website, which is being used by a small group of lawyers before expanding this month, will allow them to see documents related to other cases for 10 cents per page. The website will then be open to the general public, who will also have to pay 10 cents per page they view, in late 2019 or early 2020.
The fees will help cover enhanced technology within the UJS, Sattizahn said [Arielle Zionts, “South Dakotans Will Soon Be Able to Access Court Records from Any Computer,” Rapid City Journal, 2019.07.07].
Zionts doesn’t tell us the name of the new system. SD PACER might get confused with the federal system… so how about… SoDaCoDo? Find Universal News from Courts Any Time? Docs Online for Public Ease? Let’s have a name contest! Winner gets one free acquittal card (misdemeanors only)!
Seriously, opening court records up to our home and mobile browsers is a boon for court news. It will be much easier for reporters to track down cases concerning public figures. When people call me out of the blue and tell me that so-and-so from somewhere had to go to court, I won’t have to ask for a case number and blow my lunch hour giving up my Fourth Amendment rights at the courthouse; I’ll be able to search the records from the comfort of my home, where I can make nice neat electronic copies of the case documents. Thank you, UJS!
The new web place will be called SNOOP:putf
Sattizahn’s Not Only Online Paper: per user tax fee
Or, as the judges already call it, the blue links for the putz-snoopers.
How far back might this go? Maybe it will be easier to see hundred-year-old records of my great-grandmother’s SD Supreme Court defense of her ownership of her Turner Co. land, which her husband (my great-grandfather) tried to take over.
Cathy, I’d love to see this online portal include an archive going back as far as possible. Publishing new court documents online is probably a cheap, if not trivial administrative task: most documents are created on computers anyway, so the upload costs little if anything. If we’re going to pay 10 cents a page, that user fee should be used to scan in old documents!
I hope UJS will follow the federal PACER model in offering casual users this break: PACER doesn’t bill users until they access $10 worth of documents in a quarter. So if from July 1 through September 30 you only access, say 20 pages from one court case, that’s only $2 worth of papers, and you get them for free.