Public Defense

I know what you?ve been convicted of

By Gideon

Now, thanks to the Judiciary, so can everyone else. As promised by Representative Mike Lawlor months ago, the criminal disposition database is now online. You can search by last name and birth year, courthouse, docket number. This covers criminal and motor vehicle cases.

I haven’t decided whether to link to it. But take a look at the amount of information available. Let’s take Russell Peeler, for example:

As you can see. It gives you his name, his lawyer’s name, his lawyer’s juris number (state bar number), his year of birth, his arrest date, the arresting agency, the sentencing date, and then a lot of information about the offenses of conviction, including the sentence, what he pled to initially, the date of the offense, the date of the verdict.

Everyone is going to have access to this information. Potential employers, current employers, girlfriends, wives, boyfriends, husbands, parents and yes, nosy co-workers and bloggers.

I believe this information should be freely available, but only to those that need it and provide a valid reason for needing to know this.

The commenter who informed me of the link seemed concerned about privacy issues. I don’t know if this would be an invasion of privacy - it is, after all, public information, but I think the potential for misuse exists. Certainly we’ve seen that happen with the sex offender registry.

What do you folks think? Good idea? Bad? Doesn’t matter? Are you on there?

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Full post as published by A Public Defender on February 02, 2008 (boomark / email).