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Full Text Search of US Court records

judyrecords.com

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I've searched for "sandwich murder" and did not find what I was looking for, but the way the elisions line up are sometimes pretty funny. I've also learned that Subway shops are among the most dangerous eateries and that bologna especially seems to make people irritable enough to open fire. A few highlights for your consideration, redacted to protect the innocent, guilty, or hungry bystanders

  - that the evidence that defendant fired the murder weapon during the sandwich
  - bologna sandwich found at the crime scene
  - presence in sandwich the morning of the murder
  - ways in which they could murder her mother. these included the sandwich ... sandwich incident could not be used
  - crime of capital murder. as a habitual offender, sentenced to life ... to the "bologna sandwich" constituted reversible error
  - coroner testified that victim had eaten a fish sandwich within 2 hours ... prior to his death
  - it was not first degree murder, and the court should have ... sandwich. he paid for the sandwich, but did not pay for the coffee
  - convicted of malice murder and possession of a ... sandwich
  - she was shot and that she had some change in one hand and a sandwich in the other ... sandwich in your hand kind of slow your progress down in getting a gun out of your ... sandwich

I grew up in a small town of 5000 in rural US and the first murder in the city that I remember was a guy who killed another guy in a subway. It was one of 2 that I remember in about 18 years

There are a lot of Subways and many times they are in strip malls and gas stations. That could be an explanation. Can’t explain the bologna part.

The way they lay out their triangle cheese slices and skimp on toppings does it for me

I searched my name. It gave me a hit for someone (criminal trespass) in Texas, in a year I lived there, with my exact same height and ~same weight, and the arraignment date is my birthday. Wasn't me. Spooky!

Sleep walker per chance?

Entire search system is a long-con for a "clear your name" business.

If that other guy is a from anywhere in Central or South America, I would not go back to Texas any time in the next four years.

I just helped a guy get 14 crimes removed from his record that he didn't commit. Someone in Texas just continuously committed heinous crimes over a decade or more and they were all just added to this other guy's criminal record. They seemingly had the same first name/initial/last name (fairly common name). I'm assuming dude in Texas was allowed to commit a crime spree because every time he was pulled in front of the court it looked like he was a first time offender.

> Wasn’t me

That’s what they all say XD j/k

Won't it be wonderful when some hiring SaaS integrates JudyRecords into their system!

Some big Show HN threads a couple of years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30399881

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25150702

Search my name got the traffic infraction records, but none of the briefs and deposition I filed during discovery.

classic

I don't know how complete this database is.

I couldn't find any hits on the Alec Balwin manslaughter case for shooting and killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza.

Maybe it's not in the database because the case was dismissed by the presiding judge?

I feel like a rich, famous person probably has a lawyer/pr team to help scrub stuff.

I appreciate that "we both reached for the gun" and "he had it coming" both turn up more than a handful of hits. "and all that jazz".

"I'd do it again" -> 740 million+ hits.

Didn't the guy that did this last time get in trouble

it the same guy, same website :)

Any further details?

https://www.judyrecords.com/what-happened-with-tyler-technol...

What kind of database is this using and how is the search so performant?

Was curious too and checked the API docs - it's Elasticsearch. The docs even show the index mapping. https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/26019452/2s93Y5PKmb#d...

Very cool glad this site is still around after the fiasco with the company claiming a hack / breach when it was their own deployment revealing sealed case files.

can you elaborate ? how can sealed case files be exposed by a 3rd party index ?

Because they weren't sealed. There was no access control on the system. The vendor used obscure URLs claiming they made the system "secure."

And we know how that story always plays out.

thank you. That's shocking, and also, I feel almost dumb to ask. Its government contracting, and because you are right, that's how a story plays out.

I typed in my name and found my dad likes to drive around without a seat belt. He hates driving with a seat belt. Always has.

I'm a Jr.

My name is coming a bunch of times. They are all patents (?) citing something I wrote. What does this mean? Oh. article cited by patent applicant. I didn't know I inspired a bunch of Microsoft patents in the 2010s :D

Apparently it has Patent records as well... here's one of mine.

https://www.judyrecords.com/record/qfwy5i5yb1e9

As a free service, I wonder if the burden of complying with a right to be forgotten would be too much to sustain.

Almost certainly. Presumably why it’s not available to euros.

Also would be a very strange to apply this so-called “right” when court records are essential to keeping organs of government accountable.

Relatively sure this would be fine in some European countries. In Germany, afaik it's an ongoing question on whether there's a copyright on the records (especially from the lawyer texts).

The names and so on are always censored anyhow, in some cases it's a bit obvious who did things though. If it's a lawsuit about a company and let's say it sells books online, maybe you can tell by 1-2 things what company it is. But for people, it's not so straight forward.

> The names and so on are always censored anyhow

This is actually starting to become a problem because computers are getting too good at their job.

Let's say a news site reports on a criminal trial of a John Smith, censored as John S. If John Smith was in any way famous before the trial and had an article written about him, that article is somewhat likely to appear in the "you may also like" sidebar when you're reading the censored one. Some news sites try to suppress this, but I'm not sure they're legally required to do so.

im im EU and it is noy blocked here

Right but it only covers American courts.

I presume since it’s free and is likely domiciled/hosted in America, the owner could probably just scrape euro records and tell the EU “lol get bent” if they made a stink, but probably doesn’t want to run the risk.

I would think so if the right to be forgotten was legal principle in the United States. It only applies in Europe and I don’t think it applies to court records that are public.

In Europe, court records aren't public in the same way as they are in the US.

They're not searchable, they're often not even digitized, and the media is generally not allowed to report the full names of those accused.

Where I live, it's literally impossible to run a background check on somebody. If a background check is required, the person of interest has to specifically request an official document from the government proving they haven't been convicted for any crimes, or listing the crimes they have been convicted for. This is pretty common when starting a new job, I have had to do this.

Now there's also a sex offenders registry, which authorized institutions can query directly, although they have to get consent first.

> Where I live, it's literally impossible to run a background check on somebody.

I have a hard time imagine that law enforcement doesn't have access to it. At that point access is given by degree of difficulty and not "impossible". I could buy "illegal" tho.

Police maintains the database, so of course they can run a background check. But they don't offer it as a service and don't give away the information to anyone except the person it concerns.

> But they don't offer it as a service and don't give away the information to anyone except the person it concerns.

Here in the us I know how insubstantial this claim is. If you know enough law enforcement $10 can get you pictures of a full lookup. And this is with a fairly bare relationship.

Fair enough, if you think about it from this point of view -- yes, it's not impossible. To put your 10$ in a perspective, the last thing I heard about corrupt cops (literally last week in the news) was a bro who selling license plate readings for 500 euros through his relative (who was selling drugs). He was also smart about using somebody else's password to get them from the system, because of course requests are logged. This one got caught (obviously, this is how we know) and is getting some free accommodation paid for by my taxes. Obviously there are corrupt cops everywhere, but in Western Europe at least cops are not the underpaid power tripping assholes with guns. They also can't just get employed as a cop in a different village after being kicked out for some cop bullshit.

So maybe it's not impossible, but it's not something you would do as part of normal HR screening.

>or listing the crimes they have been convicted for. This is pretty common when starting a new job

In the Netherlands it's not even that -- you can ask for a certificate of "good behavior" with a purpose and they just say yes or no. If the purpose is employment, the form asks which sector you will be employed in, because sex offenders can still work somewhere and so do people convicted of financial fraud. You just don't want them to work in specific places, i.e. near kids or banks respectively.

Data minimization is a thing.

I believe it applies to court records, too, as long as the request for deletion is directed at an Internet search engine. The actual court record is not possible to get rid of under the GDPR, you can only make it so your court record is not returned by Google, Bing etc when searching for your name.

Someone outside Europe should make a search engine that only shows records that Euro politicians don’t want the public to see. The idea of the “right to be forgotten” is horrifying and straight out of 1984, thank god once again for the First Amendment.

I don’t know if I agree. As long as search engines are private for-profit enterprises and not a public service, I think this particular regulation is slightly more good than bad.

Tangentially, IMO any 1984 comparisons fall flat when the state is not involved in the censorship in question.

The state literally requires me to censor if you ask. I can’t speak freely what I know about you under pain of state punishment.

Are you an Internet search engine?

Jokes aside, the EU page about the GDPR right to be forgotten [1] states:

“ Here are the reasons cited in the GDPR that trump the right to erasure:

The data is being used to exercise the right of freedom of expression and information.[…]”

[1]https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/

Under US law, there is no such thing as a right to be forgotten, because it would infringe on the public's right to remember. This is considered especially important when what is being remembered is a lawsuit, where transparency is essential to protecting the public interest.

cases are generally expunged after X number of years (X varies state to state but there is always an X).

Generally not automatically, and not for civil lawsuits or for all crimes, and in the US expungement from court records does not obligate any third party to falsify newspaper archives, etc.: https://ccresourcecenter.org/state-restoration-profiles/50-s...

A recent law review article on the prospects of this so-called "right" under US law is https://mttlr.org/2020/02/why-the-right-to-be-forgotten-wont..., citing https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/420/469/ ("It is unconstitutional under the First Amendment to criminalize releasing the name of a rape victim or to permit a private right of action against the press for doing so."), and https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/12.... See also https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/13....

> because it would infringe on the public's right to remember

? What are you referring to? I've never heard of such a concept.

Think about it. If you can, employ reasoning at a deeper level than just repeating slogans and comparing them for lexical equality.

I'm not sure what a right is if not a "slogan".

Then why would you comment in the first place? Just to troll, I suppose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights

Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. Rights are an important concept in law and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology.

The history of social conflicts has often involved attempts to define and redefine rights. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "rights structure the form of governments, the content of laws, and the shape of morality as it is currently perceived".

would love this even more if the search query ended up in the URL

the search pattern implemented is strange; I'd guess to push certain users to using the api

Yeah we need to be able to pass query to share ?q=mysearch

Can someone help me with the filters? What’s the best way to search and filter/return only full case texts? I keep getting patents and stuff

Assuming this is Federal Court and not States, right?

Doesn't seem to be Federal-only, or even only major crimes. Here is a result I found for misdemeanor failure to pay taxes in Alaska: https://www.judyrecords.com/record/1q894pg6bfe9

No and it misses a lot like chancery court

Including states and counties, I got my traffic ticket result at the county level.

How do I sort the listings? I want to sort by filing date but I don't see the option for sorting. I'm on Firefox Mobile

All of the five searches I tried had Tennessee court documents as the top result, anyone else experience this?

Same here. I lived there 30 years ago, and my one speeding ticket in TN shows up first. I've had 2 or 3 "rolling stop sign" tickets in CA and can not find them.

How does one send a removal request if an EU citizen is listed in this directory?

I'm not am expert, but I don't think you can, these are public court records.

You cant be removed from the court case. But you can remove the website putting it online.

The government puts it online, the website is just the search engine.

Ah! But legal people think that all of the following are by and from and are the same person:

- the domain

- the owner of the website

- the content displayed on the website

Even if the content is dynamically generated or regurgitated from elsewhere?

And more to the point, to what end? If the info is public knowledge it's public knowledge, it's out there already.

If it matters, ask your lawyer.

If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.

Very nice.

Can you do structured field queries?

Like, all cases where defendant is X. And maybe where the cause is Y

I can’t find any of the times I’ve been in court. Not sure if good or bad.

Searching up family members is a dangerous game to play on a Friday night

Ye I don't think it is good that authority gossip get so accessable.

Interesting that it includes patents. (Found at least one of mine).

Don’t leave us hanging, what’s the nature of your patent??

Are these not available in public search sites like Google?

They're nominally available on the PACER database for a fee that is waived for infrequent users. Queries from there can be archived by the RECAP extension to make the public records unencumbered.

Can you expand on this ?

I searched the DB but it seems i couldnt get the actual docket unless i paid for a PACER sub. Is that right ? This is only an index, but to actually see the court docs, you have to pay someone ?

You sign up with a CC. At the end of the month they will reverse any charges if you stay below some threshold for number of queries. You will get PDF links to the court filings related to each case.

If it's something you want, email me at my bio and I'll pull it from PACER.

Otherwise, courtlistener has PACER docs that us users exfiltrate from PACER and upload for free.

Where is this getting the docs from? It's a lot of work for FLP/Courtlistener to get stuff, and even they don't have 100% of records (not sure if this site is claiming to have 100%, it's unclear)

Probably scraped and aggregated from the various state, municipal and federal courts directly.

At least for federal courts, the records are available on PACER but they cost money. Who is paying?

Probably https://free.law/

ETA: which is of course mentioned on the thread root. But RECAP users would be paying, in that case.

All court records are not copyrightable so once one person gets a document from PACER they are free to upload it to things like RECAP. Allegedly PACER is only allowed to charge enough to cover the infra costs of operating it, and has a pretty generous free tier nowadays so it’s mostly law firms that end up having to pay.

This. Each county pretty much has a unique system though, so it's a pain.

4,577,166 cases for marijuana.

Smoking Marijuana can ruin your life. Why? Because the state will ruin it for you if they catch you with it!

What is your opinion about Addictive social media or porn?

Sorry, had to.

You don't need the government to ruin your life for you with those :)

Then why do you say it's necessary for smoking?

The government doesn't go out of its way to throw people in prison for gooning or doom scrolling too much? But have one roach on you in the wrong state...

Really is more about quality than quantity.

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