“The courts of our state belong not to the lawyers and the judges, but to you — the public.” This is the message from Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson that graces the home page of the Wisconsin Court System’s website. The website is home to the Circuit Courts Access Program, which provides access to thousands of case records for both criminal and civil cases to the general public. But a bill that recently passed out of an Assembly committee would threaten the sentiment of Abrahamson’s message by restricting the public’s access to records of pending cases and cases that end in acquittal.
The bill is being defended as protecting those that have been wrongfully accused from embarrassment but has come under attack as being in violation of Wisconsin’s open records law, which states “all persons are entitled to the greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government and its official acts.”
The Circuit Courts Access Program can be used by anyone to perform a background check for court activity. It is often used by reporters, landlords or employers to determine if someone has been accused or convicted of a crime. Not all court records are posted to the site, but it has been proven useful for both court employees and the public alike as a quick way to get information.
Court records available on the site range from records of divorce to homicide, small claims court cases to misdemeanors and felonies — with many more in between. However, if you’re searching the site, don’t expect scores of information on cases; the details on the cases are kept to a minimum. The site’s job is to provide information, not transcripts of courtroom dramas.
The bill, proposed by Rep. Marlin Schneider, D-Wisconsin Rapids, would allow full access to court records to police, court employees and reporters, but only allow the public to see cases that ended in conviction. Schneider claims expunging the records of those proven innocent would save them from discrimination associated with the court records, but there has been no evidence that such discrimination occurs on a regular basis.
A further discredit to the bill is that Schneider admitted to exaggerating the number of complaints he has received about the current CCAP, turning 22 letters over a three-year period into “hundreds.” Gov. Jim Doyle, who won the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s Badger Award for his commitment to the open records law in 2004, agreed that changes must be made to protect those that have been exonerated, but he does not fully support the bill.
The truth of the matter is no one seems to fully support the bill. No trade groups have registered as supporting it, and the 22 people who contacted Rep. Schneider are certainly not enough for it to be deemed essential. The bill has also been clouded in misconceptions about the CCAP as it stands. Many citizens are up in arms about the fact that their traffic record is available for all to see, but upon inspection they would find minor traffic violations like speeding tickets are removed from the site after 5 years.
Another point of contention is with things such as drinking tickets, but non-traffic juvenile records aren’t posted to the site, so employers don’t have access to offenses of those under 18. Essentially, the average citizen has nothing to fear from the CCAP.
Schneider is trying to get the bill passed to protect those proven innocent from the negative connotation of having a record. While there is nothing wrong with this hope, denying the public information is not the way to go about it. Cases that have been dismissed are clearly marked as such, and the site explicitly states if the defendant was convicted or not.
As to whether or not those who were acquitted of a crime have suffered because of their association with it, there is no real way to measure the damage done, and the embarrassment of a select group of people should not be enough to justify amending a law. The bill has only 22 letters of protest to go off of, and in a state of over 5.6 million people, that number is negligible.
While it certainly is important to protect the innocent, the bill would do more harm than good. The CCAP website is accessed between 3 and 5 million times a day, proving it is not just judges and journalists doing the searching. By denying the public equal access to court cases, the bill would be doing them a disservice. As citizens, we are fully entitled to services protected by the open records law that keep the courts in our hands. That right cannot and should not be denied.
Allegra Dimperio ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in theatre and intending to major in journalism.
