Editor's note: March 14-20 is Sunshine Week, an annual effort by print, broadcast and online journalists to highlight of the importance of open government and freedom of information. Sunshine Week is led by the American Society of News Editors and funded primarily by a challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee lags behind several other states when it comes to posting court-case information online, with the vast majority of counties offering a virtual blackout of information.
Nobody tracks how many court systems throughout state allow the public to go online and look up case information, but only three out of 95 counties — Shelby, Davidson and Hamilton — appear to offer some form of the service to the public. An official with the state Administrative Office of the Courts said she knew of no other counties that provided the information online.
Of those three counties, only Shelby allows the public the ability to look up civil-court case information online for free. Open-records advocates say there's no excuse for the overwhelming majority of counties in the state not to provide the service to the public.
"If it's online in one county, then there's no reason why it shouldn't be in others," says Frank Gibson, executive director for the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government.
The sheer volume of user traffic on the Davidson County Criminal Court Clerk's office Web page suggests that the information is in wide demand. More than a million people logged onto the clerk's Web site within the last month, said Tommy Bradley, the clerk's chief administrative officer.
The Web page allows users to find out the entire criminal history on someone arrested in Nashville, dating to 1980.
"It's an extremely valuable tool for the public, at no charge," Bradley says.
It's difficult to say how Tennessee ranks because of the way the issue is tracked.
"It's hard to categorize how many states are doing this because there's so much variance on the level of information that they've put out," said Greg Hurley, an analyst for the National Center for State Courts.
Missouri, New York and Connecticut post everything online, he said. Records from the NCSC Web site show a number of other states doing better than Tennessee, including: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Tennessee does not have a unified court system, so many court clerks' offices operate differently in some ways, said Laura Click, a spokeswoman for the state Administrative Office of the Courts. One court clerk said she'd love to offer the service to the public but, unlike in Davidson County, she has no tech people to help her make the transition.
"We do not have those people who are in our office," said Williamson County Circuit Court Clerk Debbie McMillan Barrett. "That would make it much easier to happen."
Gibson, of TCOG, said he understood that money is tight for a lot of county governments right now, but he thinks they should be planning on going online when times get better.
Clerks also make money by doing background checks for people who might be able to do them for themselves online.
But Bradley, of the Davidson County Criminal Court Clerk's office, says money isn't the only issue. Many of the clerks, he said, need to change their attitude.
"You have to get away from the 'this is the way we've always done it mentality,'" he said.