District court reports to be available soon

Newspaper reports from Southeast District Court have been scant in the last few months, but not for much longer.

District court used to provide reports of recent misdemeanor and felony convictions to the public and those reports were printed on Saturdays in The Jamestown Sun. The publication of those reports is expected to resume sometime next month, said Barb Hill, Stutsman County clerk of district court.

Fourteen counties, including Stutsman, installed new software last spring in an effort to reduce the need for storage space, said Rod Olson, trial court administrator for Southeast and East Central district courts. Previously, files were stored in a vault at each county’s courthouse. That sometimes created a problem, Olson said, because some files require storage for many years and took up more space than counties had available.

The software stores information electronically, so it reduces the need for space and also the need for paper.

The new software didn’t have a function for newspaper reports, but officials are working to add one. That’s been the cause of the delay.

Since the new software reduces the need for paper, it also has the potential to reduce costs. Southeast District judges, for example, no longer have to mail files from county to county or arrive at court early to review a file. Instead, judges carry laptops with them into the courtroom and can access any file via the computer, Olson said.

“We really didn’t want to mail files around if we didn’t have to,” he said.

The new system is more efficient, Olson said, and as employees get used to it and work out kinks like the newspaper report, the system will also save money.

Other states also use it, and federal courts installed the system as well, Olson said.

The court system is installing the software statewide for a price tag of about $8.2 million, Hill said. All counties should have it by 2011. The last time the state installed new software was in 1995 and that system had grown outdated.

Another change is the North Dakota Courts website: http://ndcourts.gov/ publicsearch/contactsearch.aspx. The new site looks different and is only available for the 14 counties using the new software, but most of the information remains the same.

And now, instead of accessing a specific file in a county’s vault, those files can be accessed at a public terminal at the clerk of court’s office.

But aside from a few changes, most people may not notice the new software, Hill said.

“I don’t think the public really knows that there is a new system,” she said.

Sun reporter Katie Ryan-Anderson can be reached at 701-952-8454 or by e-mail at kryan@jamestownsun.com

Tags: north dakota, news, court, crime, felony, misdemeanor, reports, stutsman