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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me how to look up a criminal trial proceeding.
 
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charliebravo77
Jun 11, 2003

CarForumPoster posted:

I scrape data from courts and generally know a buttload about finding court information. It varies hilariously wildly county to county in the USA in a way that's super frustrating. There's no national requirement that court proceedings be put online and different states have VERY different regulations about it.

Start by googling "[county] [state] court records" if that fails google "[county] [state] clerk of courts" or just PM me the info (name, location, date, crime) and Ill find it. Browse your local clerk of court websites for things that look like record search tools. Its not uncommon that the way you have to get records is by physically going to the court house or by purchasing records via the mail.

EDIT: They're usually at the county level but they don't have to be.

This is correct on all accounts. If it's a Federal criminal charge it'll be on pacer.gov but if it's a state/county charge then it's anyone's guess as to if you'll be able to get info online as only ~70% of the ~3300 counties are available online in some capacity. Sometimes it's only civil available online which is annoying.

As someone who USES scraped (and direct-sourced) court data on a daily basis, I'm super curious about how this actually is done. I would imagine that in some states it's pretty easy like TX for example where most counties seem to use the same web/database provider and I would assume there's an API or other similar function to easily pull in records but it must be maddening in other places where each county is different or in places like OH where there's 30 city/municipal level courts in every county and every one of them is different.

* # ¿ Jul 24, 2020 10:35
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 00:33
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charliebravo77
Jun 11, 2003

 I'm an investigator so I use lots of the big name databases for public records.

* # ¿ Jul 24, 2020 12:37
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me how to look up a criminal trial proceeding.