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Wyoming Lawmakers Weigh In On Opening Court Records
Wyoming Lawmakers Weigh In On Opening Court Records
Wyoming's legislative Judiciary Committee weighed making it easier for members of the public to access court records.
Some court records, like many involving minors, are completely confidential. But most court records are viewable at county courthouses through public terminals.
Rep. Joe Webb (R-Lyman) told his fellow committee members those records are time-consuming to access and should be available online.
“We're spinning our wheels,” Webb said. “We need public access in Wyoming, because the courts need to be open.”
Rep. Jayme Lien (R-Casper) said she was tired of “hearing excuses” for why court records that are already stored electronically could not be shared online.
“The courts are supposed to be open to the citizens per Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution,” she said. “Is there an appropriate appropriation that we could give to the courts to open the court documents, to take the current cloud or server and turn that into a public-facing technology that the people could access in the state of Wyoming?”
State Court Administrator Elisa Butler said she would look into the price of doing that. She added there were practical and ethical concerns about allowing remote access to the records now available at courthouses to “individual users.”
“What we’re seeing, especially in other states, is the people or the entities that are using those systems the most are not individual entities,” Butler said. “They are people who are data-mining, data-scraping. They are going through every document to try to find the information that they want or need, and sometimes they use it for nefarious purposes … We have no mechanism to prevent that kind of data scraping.”
The committee also heard from Parker Jackson, an attorney with the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. He said PACER, the online system where anyone with an account can access federal court records, could serve as a “baseline” model for Wyoming’s own public access system.
“It's actually one of the few areas where the federal government is ahead of us on something,” Jackson said. “It’s still one of the better systems out there as far as public access to records. Yes, it doesn't look pretty, but it gets the job done. We can pull up dockets, we can go find the filings that we need.”
PACER technically charges 10 cents per page, but if a user accesses fewer than 300 pages in a three-month quarter, the entire fee is waived.
“That would get kind of at the concern you raised about having this threshold where we can serve the public without overburdening the system,” he said.
The committee could consider a bill to put those records online, but lawmakers haven’t requested a draft yet. They plan to keep discussing the matter at their next meeting in August.
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