[legalxml-courtfiling] Information to be tagged for redaction

["John M. Greacen" <john@greacen.net>]

In Las Vegas, Diane Lewis and I agreed to post a list of candidate data
elements that could be included in the Court Document 1.1 specification
for use in redacting information from court documents when they are made
available to the public.

The following is a list drawn from a work product developed by a
committee of the Conference of Chief Justices and Conference of State
Court Administrators on Public Access to Court Records.  The data
elements are examples from the document of data that appears in court
records that should not, in particular situations, be released to the
public.  Hence, this would be an ideal application for XML tagging.
Data could be present for some uses and suppressed for others, with an
application looking for the particular tags associated with the
information to be suppressed.  The data elements are:

• Name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, or place of
employment and other contact information for victims (not including
defendants) in domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, and civil
protection order proceedings;
• Name, address, telephone number and other contact information for
victims in criminal cases;
• Name, address, telephone number and other contact information for
witnesses (other than law enforcement witnesses) in criminal, domestic
violence, sexual assault, stalking, and civil protection order cases;
• Name, address or telephone number of informants in criminal cases;
• Name, address or telephone number of potential or sworn jurors in a
criminal case;
• Social security number;
• Account number of specific assets, liabilities, accounts, credit
cards, and PINs;
• Medical or mental health records, including examination, diagnosis,
evaluation, or treatment records;
• Name and address of a minor child;
• Psychological evaluations of a party, for example regarding competency
to stand trial;
• Child custody evaluations in family law or juvenile dependency (abuse
and neglect) actions;
• Description or analysis of a person’s DNA or genetic material, or
biometric identifiers;
• Proprietary business information such as trade secrets, customer
lists, etc.
• Statements of disability (such as in applications for accommodations
under the Americans with Disabilities Act);
• Address and telephone number of litigants in cases

The CCJ/COSCA document also identifies document types that should be
suppressible and photographs and physical evidence that should be
suppressible.  In my view, the document types are handled by the
Electronic Court Filing 1.1 specification which provides a
confidentiality option for any document or data element.  I believe that
photographs and physical evidence fall outside our purview, as do
official court reporter notes.

Diane, I invite your additional contributions.

Mo, Rolly and John, I hope this proves helpful in following up on this
issue from the Salt Lake meeting.  Of all the specific data element
tagging that could be useful, this list of items to be tagged for
possible redaction is -- in my personal view --of the highest current
importance.


--
John M. Greacen
Greacen Associates, LLC.
18 Fairly Road
Santa Fe, NM  87507
505-471-0203