“You can’t have one without the other,” Rosenberg said.
#Maryland judiciary court records code#
“The Edit Table is the sine qua non of the policy” regarding code use and therefore must be disclosed along with the corresponding judges’ names, said Benjamin Rosenberg, of Rosenberg Martin Greenberg LLP in Baltimore. Booth appeared unconvinced, saying the custodians regularly seek legal advice on MPIA requests.Ĭountering Cox, the Abell Foundation’s attorney told the high court that AOC’s use of the alphanumeric code is not merely an administrative act but part of an unwritten policy because the code’s use is “applied uniformly and consistently” on Case Search. “It will turn records custodians into lawyers” or require them to consult counsel for each disclosure request, including those for clearly administrative documents, Cox added.īut Judge Brynja M. Upholding the lower court decisions requiring the Edit Table’s disclosure would “stretch and expand” the MPIA’s disclosure provisions beyond those intended under the “plain and unambiguous” exemption for administrative records, Cox told the high court.
#Maryland judiciary court records trial#
Unlike those records, the Case Search database is intended to provide the public with only “the thousand-foot bird’s eye view” of the significant events in a case, such as the trial date and disposition, Cox said.Ĭase Search gives the public “a road map” of each case without requiring the administrative staff to include all the “nitty gritty” details, such as the judge’s name, Cox added. The Baltimore-based Abell Foundation has waged the fight for disclosure of the key as part of the group’s effort to track individual judges’ bail determinations in the city.Ĭox, in pressing AOC’s appeal of the lower court rulings, said the foundation and other members of the public can obtain the names of district court judges in specific cases through clerks’ offices and other publicly available records. Lower courts have held that the three-character code used instead of the judges’ names on the online database constitutes a policy or directive governing the courts’ operations and thus its key, the table, must be disclosed upon request under the MPIA. “It (the table) is there for the ease of the clerical staff.” “This isn’t some written or unwritten policy to keep the judges’ names away from the public,” Cox said. Rather, the “Edit Table” that matches the alphanumeric codes to the judges is a “purely administrative” document divorced from any policy or directive regarding court operations and thus exempt from disclosure under the state’s Public Information Act, Assistant Maryland Attorney General Kevin M. An attorney for Maryland’s Administrative Office of the Courts on Monday defended its refusal to disclose the alphanumeric key used to identify District Court judges in the public Judiciary Case Search database, telling the state’s top court the key was not a “policy” statement required to be released under Maryland state law.
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