Secrecy rules may set courts back decades
State secrecy rules may set courts back decades

By Tony Thornton

Published: March 17, 2008

When the Oklahoma Supreme Court adopted a five-year plan for the state's court system in 1995, technology was its No. 1 goal.

A chief component of that goal was to make records from all 77 counties available to the public through the Internet.

"We wanted to come into the computer age for the third branch of government,” Supreme Court Justice Joseph Watt said in 2000.

Critics say Watt and a majority of his colleagues took a giant step backward last week by ordering documents removed from the court system's Web site, www.oscn.net.

While only 13 of the state's 77 district courts can be found there, that still represents a majority of all the lawsuits and criminal cases filed in Oklahoma, because it includes Oklahoma and Tulsa counties.

At www.oscn.net, the public can access briefs, motions, rulings and other documents from those 13 district courts and the appellate courts.

But perhaps not for long.

Effective June 10, individual pleadings won't be available online. Docket information from court cases will still be accessible on www.oscn.net and a separate site, odcr.com.

In addition, court clerks will be required to redact personal identifying information from filings, such as home addresses, dates of birth and Social Security numbers.

The March 11 order, approved by five of the nine justices, was motivated in part by fears of identity theft, according to the court's majority opinion.

"Clearly there were people here who thought it was important to have this system at state expense.... And now you're going backwards and saying, ‘We're going to make you work harder to get information that we deem to be public.' It makes no sense,” said Horvit, whose organization staged a workshop in Oklahoma City over the weekend.

Horvit isn't alone.

The majority opinion has drawn widespread criticism, including some from three members of the Supreme Court.

Justice Marian Opala called the new rules ill-conceived and shocking. In a dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justices Yvonne Kauger and James Edmondson noted that courts in general are relying on the Internet to provide the public "greater and easier access to information to which it is entitled.”

"However, as a result of the Court's order, not only is the Court taking a giant, 30-year leap backwards to a time when the personal computer was nonexistent, the public is now paying for access to a system which is made inaccessible by the order,” the dissenting order states.

Attorney General Drew Edmondson said last week while some of the court's order seemed a prudent effort to protect identify theft, the aspect removing records from the Internet "may have gone too far.”

"Most states, you have to go to the courthouse to get it,” Horvit said.

Oklahoma appears headed back to that method, although Chief Justice James Winchester has indicated the court may revisit aspects of the order.

Horvit noted that in Oklahoma and other states, pleadings from federal court cases can be accessed at pacer.uscourts.gov.

Filings found there often provide the same sort of personal information for which the Supreme Court wants to shield access, Horvit said.

"So you're going to have a situation in Oklahoma where you can ... get federal court records on people who have been in the court system, but that same information won't be available on the state level, even though it's capable of being provided. So you have this weird dual system, and what's the reason for that?” Horvit asked.

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