Vol. 4, No. 24
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October 15, 2007
Nevada's Online State News Journal
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COPYWRITING
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Court Records May
Become More Accessible
Supreme Court Looking
At Checking Sealing
Many judges, primarily in Clark County have been sealing court records and have not had to justify the procedure. Since 2001, more than 100 civil cases have been sealed in southern Nevada alone. This practice was discussed during the last legislative session and the consensus was that it should be handled by the Supreme Court rather than by lawmakers. The Court appointed a Commission on Preservation, Access, and Sealing of Court Records to come up with a solution. The chairman is Washoe District Judge Brent Adams who has fought the sealing of records for a long time.
The committee has made a proposal to the Supreme Court, which would require civil court records to be open with few reservations. According to court sources when a case is sealed it is virtually gone, not just from the record, but gone. It would take a major effort to unseal a case even with a separate court order. It has been a tenet that civil cases are open unless something "compelling" forces the sealing. It has been the other way around in many Nevada courts recently.
According to the commission, the draft they will offer the Supreme Court will allow anyone, whether a party to a case or not, to ask for the records to be unsealed. Objections could be made, but they would have to be very compelling. Proprietary trade secrets or state or federal law requiring secrecy would be considered compelling. What will make the policy work is that before a case could be sealed a judge would have to prove to the court that it should be sealed.
One other segment of the draft policy allows the case to be identified, which is not the case currently in Nevada. Certain information must be available even if a case does pass the "sealing rules," Adams said. Such things as docket numbers, names of the parties involved, and attorneys and judges in the case must be public record. According to the draft document, such things as juvenile records and domestic relations records, which are sealed by law, are not changed by the new proposed policy.
The Supreme Court will take whatever amount of time it needs to discuss and debate the policy report. There is no timetable in which the court will release a final decree. The one part of the proposed policy change that Adams and others are most excited by is that entire civil cases will no long be sealed, a practice that has become prevalent in Clark County. Interestingly, one of the Clark County District Judges that often sealed many of her cases, Nancy Saita, now sits on the Supreme Court.
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