It’s 2022. Aren’t we supposed to have flying cars, pizzas that materialize out of thin air onto our dinner tables and robot servants?
Instead, when West Virginia’s DeLorean hit 88 mph, we seem to be rocketing back through time instead of forward. There are so many instances of that, and you can fill in your own blanks here.
But, we here at The West Virginia Record have one complaint that has been a major problem for us since we started our newspaper and website back in 2005. It’s online access to the court system.
Believe it or not, we used to have access to 41 county court systems online through a wonderful website called WV Circuit Express. It was usually updated every day, and we had hundreds of new civil filings to sort through.
Then came progress! Bet you think we now have access to all 55 counties, right?
Not so fast, friends!
Now, Circuit Express gives us access to eight counties. Yes, less than 20 percent of what we used to be able to get.
And in one of those counties (Kanawha, the largest in the state), two of the circuit judges – Jennifer Bailey and Duke Bloom – still refuse to grant us access to civil court filings after years of requests and begging. Kanawha circuit court judges, by the way, always have been the only judges in the state who refused to grant online access to their cases. (We won’t even go into how some courthouses still charge us for copies of cases if we do go in person.)
Thankfully, we do have access to most filings with the state Supreme Court. Same with the federal courts that uses a different system we can peruse quite easily. And, we hope we have access to everything in the Intermediate Appellate Court system when it opens next month.
Full disclosure: Most counties that were part of the fantastic Circuit Express system gradually are being switched to a new statewide e-filing system that’s been in the works for years but still isn’t finished. That isn't the fault of the fine folks at Circuit Express.
Sure, a statewide system sounds fantastic.
But you know what isn’t so great? We don’t have access to this new system yet. Which means unless we want to travel to every county in the state every week, we don’t know what new lawsuits are being filed across West Virginia.
So, that means you – our faithful readers – don’t know what’s going on in our court system. And that is a major problem. The press is supposed to be the conduit between government and the public. But we can’t do that to the fullest if we don’t have access either. And how can the citizens of this state be fully informed about what's happening in our court system?
Wonder what’s going on in the Wood County Courthouse? Or Ohio County? Or Raleigh County? Or Monongalia County? Or Berkeley County? We do, too. And we’d tell you if we had a way to look at new filings there.
Access to courts? Yeah, right. If you believe that, we have a flying car we want to sell you.