Consolidated Courts

Posted: Jul 23, 2009 |Comments: 0 |

To thoroughly understand the process of conducting "real" criminal records background checks it is necessary to have a rudimentary understanding of the structure of the court system in the state where the search is conducted, especially with respect to consolidated courts and how criminal records are kept and dispersed.

The very simple definition (by me) of a consolidated court is one where the Superior or District or Circuit court clerk's office keeps and disperses records of that court and all related courts in that county (and only that county or district). What this means is that, for the purposes of searching for criminal records, one has to search in only one place per county. Prior to consolidation of the courts if someone wanted to search for criminal records of a person and they did not know where specifically to search, the researcher would have to search all lesser or outlying courts in a particular county or judicial district for those records.

For example: By my count, Los Angeles County has 40+ courts from Catalina Island to Pomona and from Santa Clarita to Long Beach. Prior to court consolidation you could get felony case information at the superior court in downtown Los Angeles, but if you wanted misdemeanor or infraction information you had to either guess which lower court to check or check them all, and that would involve physically going to each court to conduct the search. As you can imagine very few misdemeanor and infraction records are discovered in a system such as that.

However, since the courts were consolidated in 2000 a court researcher looking for criminal records has to look in only one place; LA Superior Court in downtown LA, not 40 different locations in the same county. In fact, a court researcher can go to any of the 40+ courts and access the records of all of the courts and get all of the criminal information including infractions like traffic tickets, misdemeanors and felonies.

Some states are not consolidated. In several states, such as Mississippi, Massachusetts, Montana and Wyoming the courts are not consolidated. The result is that searching for records one is, in most cases, only going to retrieve information on felony cases only because the search is being conducted at the highest level court in the county and the records are for that court only. Most lesser crimes such as traffic infractions and misdemeanors are adjudicated in the lower courts. These Municipal, Justice or Chancellery courts also handle things like small claims and other minor civil court cases.

Remember the following regarding records searching:

1. Juvenile court records are almost always sealed and unavailable.

2. In states where records are searched by county and not statewide (such as California) each county Superior Court has records of that county only. The subject of your investigation could be an axe murder from the adjoining county, but your county court would not have a record of it.

3. Some states Like New York have statewide conviction only criminal history databases.

4. Other states like Georgia and Michigan have and even more restrictive felony convictions only databases. (This is the kind of info you get in those "Instant Nationwide" database checks).

5. Different states have different names for their main county courts. In most states it is called Superior Court. In some remote areas of the country a Circuit Court may be the highest court in a district that may encompass more than one county. The name is a holdover from the days when a judge traveled on horseback to courts in each territory.

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