from the should-try-this-with-emails-too dept.
A news item we covered last month here on SoylentNews has come full circle and the Administrative Office of the Courts has agreed to restore Ten Years of records purged from their on-line system without warning.
ArsTechnica is reporting that the move angered members of Congress, because most of these documents were electronically available nowhere else, and would require traveling to one of the 5 various court's main offices to dig through paper documents. Slightly better than being "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard” but hardly fitting anyone's definition of accessible.
Affected under the online purge are about a combined decade's worth of court dockets and all manner of documents at the US Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th, and Federal Circuits, as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California.
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According to the Washington Post the federal court system's PACER electronic database of court records had deleted a ton of old cases. Charles Hall, a spokesperson for the Administrative Office, told The Post via e-mail that the change was made on Aug. 11 in preparation for an overhaul of the the PACER architecture, including the implementation of the next generation of the Judiciary's Case Management and Electronic Case Files System.
"However, as a result of the changes the locally developed legacy case management systems of some courts were no longer compatible with PACER, he says. Since PACER works as a sort of distributed network of different archives rather than one centralized database, that's a major problem.
However, Hall says, the dockets and documents no longer available through the system could still be obtained directly from the relevant court and "all open cases, as well as any new filings, will continue to be available on PACER."
Techdirt has coverage on efforts being made by parties interested in restoring and preserving digital access to these records.
[Ed's Note: Although TFA is saying 'deleted' it is more accurate to say that some documents will not be stored on PACER. There is more in the article regarding an alternative effort to archive the documents in question, as referred to in the TFS.]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday September 20 2014, @12:49PM
Members of Congress = Lawyers. These kind of people care about legal papers. So whenever you need to get your message forward. You need to implicate possible detriment of any legal system ;)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 20 2014, @04:01PM
We need to find a way to recover the statistically wide distribution of careers and backgrounds that SHOULD make up the United States Congress.
Some suggestions:
- Lawyers only allowed to run for Senate - lawyers always outnumbered
- Lawyers not allowed to run for office - make law or practice law, not both
Food for thought.
(Score: 2) by redneckmother on Saturday September 20 2014, @06:46PM
Lawyers make good targets at gun ranges. Expert marksmen can shoot off the knots on neckties, allowing foreskins to roll up.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 1) by zafiro17 on Saturday September 20 2014, @09:08PM
Is the locked file cabinet/leopard a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference? If so, well-done.
Winning through abuse of shitty bureaucracy is no win at all.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey