| Greenville County gets ready to post court records
online GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Records from one of the state's busiest court systems will soon be just a few clicks away on the Internet. Starting early next year, the Greenville County Clerk of Court's office will put criminal and civil court records online, joining a handful of South Carolina counties that have their court records on the Internet. State Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal said the ultimate goal is for all counties to go online and link to one another. While the records have always been available to the public at the courthouse, they weren't as public as they will be now, said Anita L. Allen-Castellito, law and philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in Internet privacy. "It's more than just making what's already public more public," she said. "It's making what was functionally private now functionally public." And that wider availability worries people who make money from researching court records, including Jimmy Davis, owner of A-1 Investigations in Easley. Davis drives from one Upstate courthouse to the next, running background checks on as many as 2,000 people a month at the request of prospective employers and landlords. The comfortable living that work makes for Davis and his wife is threatened by the fact that more counties are putting those records online. Davis and his wife currently get that information to their clients within 24 to 36 hours. With online access, their clients can get it as fast as their browser allows. "Why would they need a middle man?" Davis said. "A person can just stay at the computer and run anything." There are privacy concerns, too. Putting those records out there for everyone will greatly reduce the amount of anonymity people currently enjoy, especially those who have something they may want to keep from public consumption, Allen-Castellito said. "It will definitely change the sense of privacy that currently surrounds people with bankruptcy, divorces, marriages, child-custody fights, lawsuits, civil suits and so forth," she said. Allen-Castellito said putting the records online shouldn't pose identity problems as long as vital numbers are redacted. Greenville County Clerk of Court Paul Wickensimer said social security numbers will be blocked from public view and, for now, the documents themselves will not be available online. But other information will be available. If a person has ever been charged as an adult and their record has not been expunged, their street address, race, age and offense will all appear on the screen. Sometimes the records of those who paid a fee to have them expunged may appear, according to Rick Hill, a programmer for Anderson County's Management Information Systems, which put Anderson County court records online earlier this year. Anderson County's Web site has been extremely popular, Hill said. The records have been searched more than 662,000 times since it began in January. Charleston County has been putting its records on the Internet since 1998, Robert Duncan, operations manager for the county's clerk of court, said. Not only does it make it easier for the attorneys, he said people have told him they've used the program to run background checks on doctors and contractors.
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