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Stop secret dockets

Some Florida courts have kept certain cases out of public scrutiny, without authority to do so. This practice has no place in our system.

There is a secret judiciary operating in some parts of Florida. Cases that have been litigated in courts around the state, including more than 200 in Pinellas County, have been kept off the public docket. It is as if they never existed. Regardless of the intent behind such secrecy, it violates a fundamental tenet of our court system: judicial records and proceedings should be public unless they are specifically exempted by law. If the court clerks and judges won't reconsider, then Attorney General Charlie Crist, who has already opened an investigation into the practice, should take further action.

While there is a narrow legal justification for making parts of a court file confidential, there is no legal authority for judges or clerks at their own discretion to hide every trace of a typical civil lawsuit. The reason is simple - court proceedings are presumptively public, but it is impossible for the public to object to a sealed court record when its existence is not known or acknowledged.

In Pinellas County, there have been hundreds of cases left off the docket since 2001, according to Court Clerk Ken Burke, in matters such as sexual violence, divorce, contract disputes and name changes. Burke says the practice of removing cases from the docket has been in existence since at least 1981 and it is clear that some were removed in error.

After discussing the matter with Pinellas-Pasco Chief Judge David Demers, Burke says the policy going forward will be to maintain all cases on the public docket unless state law directs that a certain category of cases be removed or a judge orders the removal. He points to adoptions, for example, which Burke says are removed from the public docket by direction of a state statute. Burke also promised to review the cases that have already been removed to see where mistakes have been made.

Burke is to be commended for his prompt response once questions were raised. But it is imperative that all Pinellas County matters be returned to the public docket as soon as possible, unless exempted by state law. (And it is possible that even state law goes too far in hiding some cases from the public.)

In Hillsborough County, Court Clerk Pat Frank says that other than adoption cases, she believes no other cases have been kept off the public docket. But she plans to investigate a glitch in the computer system that prevents the public from seeing the docket entries of sealed case files.

There is no justification for a civil case involving a divorce or malpractice to disappear entirely from the public record. The public has a right to know how its judicial resources are being used.

[Last modified June 16, 2006, 06:03:01]