Decade of Court Cases Quietly Wiped from Online Database

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/08/28/decade-court-cases-quietly-wiped-online-database



PACER removes electronic copies of cases from five US courts with no warning in 'upgrade' to new system

Decade of Court Cases Quietly Wiped from Online Database
Nadia Prupis, staff writer
Thursday, August 28, 2014

A decade of records from four U.S. appeals courts and one bankruptcy court were lost earlier this month when the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) quietly deleted a massive amount of data that was "incompatible" with an impending upgrade.

"As of August 10, the following information will no longer be available on PACER," read a statement on the company’s website, which was published after the files were wiped on August 11. The statement was re-written a few days later to say, "[T]he judiciary is no longer able to provide electronic access to the closed cases on those systems. The dockets and documents in these cases can be obtained directly from the relevant court."



The relevant courts in question are in New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The Administrative Office defended the decision by noting that the cases that were removed were closed and that many had not been accessed in several years. Karen Redmond, a spokesperson for the Administrative Office, told Common Dreams, "Some of these cases have been closed for over 13 years. Anything that's open remains available at the courts."

But Brian Carver, co-founder of Free Law Project and an assistant professor at University of California at Berkeley School of Information, said many of the files were "very relevant and very recent" and others were landmark civil rights cases. "If these five courts don't provide some kind of accommodation... it will be extremely problematic for practitioners, for researchers, for the public who just want to find out about a big case," Carver told Common Dreams. "PACER is so difficult and so expensive that its usage statistics should tell us nothing about the importance of these files."