IN GREENVILLE COUNTY, magistrates who once had to rely on a spotty paper system can now check their computer when a bad-check writer stands before them, and find out whether the offender has faced these charges before, and thus determine both what the crime and what the sentence should be.

Instead of creating a new record at each step as a rape case moves from police to jail to solicitor to court, officials in those offices can now call up the one record on the defendant and add the latest information to it.

When the solicitor drops the charges against an accused thief, the record is automatically available to the jail, so the prisoner can be released instead of having to wait for paper documents to move from office to office.

And by January, anyone in the world can peruse these public records from the comfort of their desktop.

Greenville is just the start. Richland and Pickens counties will be rolling out their own electronic case management systems over the next few months. And the rest of the state is expected to follow.

It’s all part of an admirable effort Chief Justice Jean Toal has undertaken to open up our criminal justice system — despite the lack of funds, despite courts’ traditional reluctance to embrace innovation, despite being part of a state that has never placed a high priority on spending money up-front for long-term payoffs, or on making information readily available to the public.

Justice Toal’s priority with the new system, which she built with federal grants and unveiled last month, is to make her courts more efficient, on two levels.

First, there’s financial efficiency — an increasingly important goal as state funds dwindle while the court’s workload increases. In Greenville County, for instance, as many as 24 separate records were created for each case, and housed in up to 24 separate databases; this system slashes data entry time.

Perhaps more important is judicial efficiency. Less data entry means less chance for error. A single record on each case means crucial steps — which can determine whether a case is successfully prosecuted — are less likely to be missed. It means crucial information is less likely to be lost or overlooked.

All of this is important to the public, because it’s in everybody’s interest for the guilty to be found guilty and appropriately sentenced, the innocent to be found innocent and the entire process to move forward as quickly as possible. But what’s likely to be of most direct interest to the public is the online aspect of the system, which will allow us to easily locate the information we have traditionally had to trudge to the police department or the jail or the court (or multiple courts) to track down. That means victims in criminal cases as well as plaintiffs and defendants in civil cases can easily keep up with their cases. It means the public in general can more easily find out about important (or just plain interesting) civil cases and, more importantly, monitor the job the criminal justice system is doing.

Because they deal with so much information about individuals, the courts have been slower than much of government to make information easily available to the public. Those that are moving in that direction sometimes are reluctant to stay true to public access; federal officials, for instance, have rolled out a plan to redact a great deal of public information from court documents before they put them online. We commend Justice Toal for rejecting such limits and for going out of her way to be among the nation’s leaders in the effort to catch our court system up with the information age.