Special Report - Sanitizing Courthouse Dirt

Sanitizing Courthouse Dirt
September 6, 2002
by John Bloom

Back in the eighties we kept this book in the newsroom called the "Federal Investigator's Manual." We needed it, since most of us ink-stained wretches had never bothered to get any private investigation training and we learned everything on the job.

What was interesting about the book, which had a big fake "Classified" stamp on the cover, is that 95 per cent of the tips- -how to track a fleeing suspect, how to trace a wrecked car, how to find out if someone has offshore bank accounts--were things you could do without having an FBI badge or even identifying yourself. Almost everything you would ever need to find out was written down in some public place where you could just go and look at it.

And yet a lot of guys didn't bother to look at it--because there were always two kinds of reporters. The first were the gritty, street-tough guys who thought it was all about "developing sources." These were guys who would spend hours on the phone talking to guys named Manny and going to dark bars to meet with informants and wiseguys. For some reason they always wore corduroy jackets. One guy in the office had so many criminal sources he was thought to be working for the government, a reputation that followed him his whole career and made us all a little afraid of him.

The other kind of reporter was a guy like me. "I'll be at the library" or "I'll be at the courthouse" were my two most common farewells. And then I would go Dumpster-diving in these oceans and oceans of official records that were kept in metal filing cabinets, usually superintended by middle-aged ladies who had to be sweet-talked into fishing them out.

After you do this for a while, you develop shortcuts. And the shortcut of all shortcuts, which I'll reveal here for those of you thinking of a journalism career, is this:

Everything is in Divorce Court.

Of course, you would occasionally run into someone who hadn't been divorced, but I would say 80 per cent of the time, the person would have been in some kind of family court at least once in his life, and if he hadn't, then it's possible that his parents or spouse or children had. And where you have child custody battles, or nasty divorces, or, better yet, multiple nasty divorces, you've got so much information you'll need to hire a U-Haul to take home all your Xerox copies.

The next best thing was an appearance in criminal court, although those files tended to be limited to a particular crime and a brief period of time. Even worse, most minor criminal trials are not appealed and so they have no transcript. To get it, you have to go find the court reporter and pay some exorbitant price to get her to type it up for you.

Much better are the documents surrounding the criminal case. For example, if the guy gets hauled in repeatedly for parole violations, then every time he shows up, he has to talk about his job, his family, his girlfriend, his finances, his business, his drug tests, his car--and it's all in the file.

The third best thing was civil litigation that involves vast sums of money. This always meant you would have two teams of lawyers taking days and days of depositions from every person who had ever known the defendant or the plaintiff, and inevitably it would be full of personal information that had nothing to do with the civil case.

Anyway, my point is, thank God for open courts. Once, after a particular family refused to talk to me on the phone, I drove 400 miles just to visit a West Texas courthouse, not knowing whether the family had ever even been inside that courthouse. After some skepticism from the county clerk--the smaller the county, the fiercer they are about wanting to know what you're doing--I spent three pleasant days ensconced in a janitor's room and ended up with more information than if the family had just cooperated in the first place.

But hallelujah, there's now relief in sight for us packrat- style investigators. A county clerk in Cincinnati--God bless him- -has finally come along and said, "Why not just put all these records on the Internet and save everybody some time?"

One thing that I love about this idea is that it permanently erases the possibility of fires. Our legal history is full of gaps caused by fires that have periodically raged through courthouses (after all, they're full of paper)--and who knows how many of them were set by people trying to frustrate nosy people like me?

Unfortunately, ever since Hamilton County Clerk Jim Cissell posted all the county's documents on the Web four years ago, he's been besieged with complaints from people who say it's an invasion of privacy. People don't want their traffic warrants and speeding tickets on the web. They don't want their child-support details on there (especially if they're deadbeats). Doctors don't want their malpractice cases on there, and debtors don't want people to know how much they owe to credit card companies.

What's amazing to me, though, is that the Ohio legislature is taking these complaints seriously. They're preparing new laws to block some of the data, including financial data--hell, that's half of what's in there--and details that could lead to identity theft. I'm all in favor of protecting things like Social Security numbers, but as to everything else:

It was already public. It's been public for 226 years. It's 100 per cent public. The Internet is just a tool to make the data easier to manipulate.

It seems to me this is another example of legislators who think there's such a thing as too much democracy and openness-- and inevitably it's the Web they attack as the symbol of the rowdy unregulated mob. (That would be the same mob that elected them to office.) When we had a series of day-trading scandals, they blamed the Web--even though day trading has existed since the beginning of the stock market itself. When they got livid over pornography, they focused on the Web--even though porno didn't begin with the Web and wouldn't end if the Web vanished tomorrow. When they're angered by political rumors, they blame the bloggers on the Web--evidence that rumor-mongering has been transferred to a place beyond their control.

The Web doesn't invent anything. The Web just makes everything more accessible. Regulating the web is like trying to regulate the supply of No. 2 pencils. You can't call yourself a small-d democrat and think that the Web is anything but an extension of democracy and openness. To argue against public disclosure, you would need to be in the same political parties that argued against giving the vote to women and blacks--because they weren't sophisticated enough for democracy--and I don't think we've had such a political party for at least a hundred years. It's like saying, "Open courts are open for those who have the resources to make them open."

One of the legislature's specific targets is the gold mine of all courthouse expeditions: divorce filings. There are quite a few Ohio legislators who want them taken off the Internet, if not sealed entirely. But on what cockeyed theory of law do you start closing courts and sealing court records for no reason other than that being in public makes people uncomfortable? You may have noticed the controversial articles last week on former General Electric chairman Jack Welch and his $9-million-a-year severance contract and other perks. Virtually everything in those articles came from the filings in his pending divorce case.

I would be amazed if the courts ultimately approved of secrecy, if for no other reason than this:

When you go into a courthouse, you're telling the government that you can't settle your own problems and asking the people to settle them for you. That's why the people get to know everything about your personal affairs.

Besides which, I'm tired of driving 400 miles and sweet- talking little old ladies.

Return to Column Archive