JIS Data Dissemination Committee

May 20, 2011

Judge Wynne called the meeting to order and the following items of business were discussed.

1. Information Technology Governance Request (ITG) 90

The committee has been asked to be the endorser of this request. The Requestor is AOC employee Kevin Ammons on behalf of Washington attorney Kevin Tarvin. Mr. Tarvin’s request concerns the “Attorney’s Search” feature on the AOC public case search website. Entering an attorney’s WSBA number into this search will pull up a list of district and municipal court proceedings associated with the attorney’s bar number.

Mr. Tarvin has requested that this feature either be password-protected (so that only the individual attorney can access the information) or else removed from the website.

The committee members commented as follows:

• Some members of the public use this site to obtain information on what types of cases an attorney has experience in;
• This information is part of the public record of a case.

The committee members stated that they would like more information before they make a decision on this request:

1. They would like more information from Mr. Tarvin on the reason for his request; and
2. They would like information from ISD regarding a) the amount of usage of this website feature and, b) the historical reason for the creation of this feature.

Further Action: Staff will try to obtain the information requested by the committee members and will refer the matter back to the committee when the information is obtained or determined to be not available.

2. Substitute House Bill 1793 (Chapter 333, Laws of 2011) – Restricting Access to Juvenile Records

The committee discussed this bill, which includes a provision that creates a legislative task force to make recommendations on restricting access to juvenile records. The bill specifies that a representative from this committee sit on the task force. Judge Wynne volunteered to discuss the appointment of the representative with Justice Fairhurst, who is the Chair of the JISC.

Further Action: Judge Wynne will discuss this matter with Justice Fairhurst.

3. Request by Snohomish County Juvenile Court for JCS Access for the County Mental Health Counselor

The committee considered a written request by the Snohomish County Juvenile Court to give JCS access to a mental health counselor, employed by Snohomish County, who provides services at the county juvenile detention center. The committee approved the request for access, so long as the access could be restricted to the counselor viewing information only on juveniles currently housed in the Snohomish County juvenile detention center.

The Committee further decided that if this request needs to go through the Information Technology Governance (ITG) process to be implemented, the committee’s endorsement of the proposal has a maximum spending limit of $5,000. If the analysis by AOC shows that it will cost more than $5,000 to implement this request, the request should be sent back to this committee for a decision on whether or not the request should be implemented. Staff noted that it may not be necessary to go through the ITG process on this request if a security profile with the correct level of access already exists in the JCS.

Further Action: Staff to determine what steps are necessary to implement limited JCS access for the mental health counselor as granted by this committee. If it is necessary to proceed through the ITG process, the committee’s action will be considered as the endorsement of the request and the request should move to an analysis of the request. If the AOC analysis shows that implementation will cost more than $5,000, the request will be brought back to the committee for a decision on whether or not implementation should proceed, taking the new information on cost into consideration. If implementation will not cost more than $5,000, than the request should be moved to the recommendation stage after the analysis.

4. Display of Names from Parking Tickets on the AOC Public Case Search Website

The committee considered a request from Shannon Hinchcliffe, the AOC court services analyst for the courts of limited jurisdiction, to change how parking tickets are displayed on the AOC public case search website. Currently, some courts enter parking tickets into the JIS and some courts do not. If the court enters the ticket into the JIS, the owner of the vehicle is entered into the JIS as the “defendant”, even though parking tickets are “vehicle records” and not “person records” in JIS. The person entered as the “defendant” then is displayed on the public case search as a “defendant”. Ms. Hinchcliffe received a complaint from a member of the public who is displayed as a “defendant” in the case search because he was the registered owner of the vehicle, even though he was not the driver at the time the vehicle received a parking ticket.

The committee decided that this issue should be addressed via the ITG process and that the endorsing group should be the court level user group (CLUG) for the courts of limited jurisdiction, rather than this committee, since that group will be more familiar with why and how some courts use the JIS to manage parking tickets and the ramifications of making changes to the way the cases display on the public website. The ITG request should include the Data Dissemination Committee’s recommendation that the name of the registered owner of the vehicle not display as a “defendant” on the public case search website.

Further Action: Staff will advise Shannon Hinchcliffe of the committee’s decision.