All clear:

About 50 others waiting in the hallway presented a petition asking for the meeting to be postponed because they couldn’t hear the proceedings.

After nearly three hours of discussion among commission members, the commission voted 10-2 not to hear any comments from the public.

Pal-Item

Justice Thomas has it rough:

“There’s not much that entices about the job,” Thomas said. “There’s no money in it, no privacy, no big houses, and from an ego standpoint, it does nothing for me.”

Thomas, 59, said the position is satisfying because he feels he’s serving the public, and he’s honored by it, “but I wouldn’t say I like it.”

“I like sports,” Thomas said. “I like to drive a motor home.”

Orange County Register via the Law Blog.

Money, big houses, ego boosts . . . sounds like Thomas is in the wrong field.

From Tom Philpott:

Why did Hillary Clinton turn to the CAFO industry to help run her campaign in the farm belt?

On Monday, Clinton named Joy Philippi, the former president of a the National Pork Producers Council, the main trade group representing CAFO operators, as co-chair of Rural Americans for Hillary.

The campaign press release was vague on details. It quotes the candidate thusly: “I am honored to have Joy’s support, and delighted that she’ll play a leading role in my campaign in Nebraska and nationally.” And that’s all the explanation offered.

Gristmill

Hey folks, as an update to this post, be sure to go back and check the comments.

To understand what is going on here in this public vs. private effort to bring the local court scheduling records together in a state wide computer system, you need to know some of the background: Historically, each county was responsible for maintaining their local court records and providing access to the public. As technology progressed, courts wanted to store scheduling and other court related information on computers for better access.

Each trial court was left to make its own decisions on how to do this. Some small counties, like Union County, kept with the paper systems in place, but most moved to computers. While Fayette County Circuit Court Judge Daniel Pflum wrote his own court scheduling system, most courts turned to a handful of private companies to develop commercial software to handle the task. One of the biggest providers in Indiana turned out to be CSI, Inc., a firm run by Kevin Cook. Kevin’s company has been maintaining sophisticated and effective court scheduling software in local Indiana courts across the state for over 20 years.

Along comes Doxpop, and through a partnership with CSI and other vendors, brings internet access to these records. The important thing about this effort is that it was structured such that internet access was provided to these records at no cost to the counties. All of this has been done on a voluntary basis, albeit, with the express permission of the Indiana State Court Administration.

Several years ago, the State decided that it would construct a computer system for these local court records which would be controlled by the state, and mandated on all the courts across the state. Since this announcement, courts, vendors like CSI and Doxpop have wondered how this new system would impact them, but the state system has been, to say the least, delayed, its been business as usual, save for the fact that no one can plan for the future.

Now the State has announced that it will start a pilot of its central system in Monroe County this month. This means that CSI will be shut out of Monroe and Monroe’s current data will be pulled out of Doxpop.

As Kevin points out, the State is planning to spend real taxpayer dollars on its effort:

The Indiana Supreme Court who plans to spend nearly $100 million taxpayer dollars is offering courts a CMS system that forces a court to transact, store and retrieve court information including confidential juvenile, mental health, adoption, personal information over the internet and this confidential information will be housed under the Indiana Supreme Court’s control and view.

So the plan is, take a system of private companies working in cooperation with local courts to bring case information to the public via the internet at no cost to the public, while leaving the local courts in control of their own data, and scrap it so the State can spend millions, effectively putting private companies out of business, and forcing local courts to give up control of their own records.

Kevin points to a Monroe County blog for additional information Pin-the-Tail.

[Full Disclosure: I have done legal work for Doxpop]

Kudos to Marcia Oddi over at the Indiana Law Blog for bringing attention to the move by the Indiana Supreme Court’s administrative division to bring its plan to connect all county courts through a centralized computer network, and in the process, block out a private company that already links about half of Indiana county courts.

The Office of State Court Administration is rolling out its first test site in Monroe County, one of the first counties that had its scheduling data on the web via Doxpop. Marcia notes:

The entry went on to quote from a DoxPop memo that began “The Courts of Monroe County are planning changes that will affect your ability to access up-to-date Monroe County case information via the Doxpop system after December 17, 2007,” and then continued by explaining that DoxPop was attempting to work out an interface between the JTAC and DoxPop systems.

Apparently these efforts have thus far proven unsuccessful, according to a letter sent out today by Ray Ontko, President, which begins:

To all Doxpop users:

The Courts of Monroe County plan to stop sending case information to Doxpop on December 17, 2007. Doxpop plans to continue to provide access to historical case information, but new information about current cases will no longer be available via the Doxpop website.

The Monroe Courts are switching to a new case management system (CMS) provided by the State Court’s Judicial Technology and Automation Committee (JTAC). On October 25 we formally requested access to Monroe County case information via the new system. We are waiting for the Division of State Court Administration to act on our request.

It looks like JTAC’s “pilot program” may not encompass any effort to interface the new CMS system with the long-term and wide-ranging existing networks upon which the legal community relies.