I need to review all the various documents filed in a long running and now dormant civil case. My county has sent all the hard copies off to a service that apparently scans them, then stores and serves out the scanned images back to the originating county. The county claims there is no way for a citizen to view any of the documents "until we build a new courthouse", which while in the plans is likely years away. I think the real issue is that the county has to pay for access to its own scanned docs in the form of licensed computer chairs, and they don't want to allocate any to the general public, so are paying for only 2 that go to the computers used by court staff for their work, and letting the public use them would be disruptive. I understand the likely hassles involved, but it seems like court records should be public records, which by definition should be available to the public. I don't want to have to pay for copies of every document in the file (although they haven't proposed that to me yet as an option) as most are likely useless for my purposes, and the number of pages would be huge.
What laws/court decisions would explicitly direct the county to find a way to either let me sit down and go through page by page on on e of their computers, or better, make me a readable electronic copy for a reasonable fee?
What laws/court decisions would explicitly direct the county to find a way to either let me sit down and go through page by page on on e of their computers, or better, make me a readable electronic copy for a reasonable fee?
