During its biannual meeting in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, the Judicial Conference of the United States approved several changes in the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, according to a news release.
PACER provides online access to federal court records.
(PACER)
Federal courts will now be able to make digital audio recordings of court hearings available through PACER for $2.40 per file. The move follows a two-year pilot project. Previously, individuals could obtain audio only via a CD recording from a court clerk’s office for $26.
The Judicial Conference also approved adjusting the fee schedule from an annual billing cycle to a quarterly billing cycle. Because users are not billed unless they accrue more than $10 in charges during the billing cycle, the change will increase the amount of data available to an individual before they face a bill. In fiscal 2009, about 153,000 PACER account holders — nearly half of all active accounts — did not receive a bill, according to the release. If the quarterly billing cycle had been in effect, an additional 85,000 accounts would not have received bills, or about a total of 75 percent of all active accounts.
The Judicial Conference also approved a pilot program in as many as 12 courts to publish federal district and bankruptcy court opinions via the Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys).
The Judicial Conference is the policy-making body for the federal court system.
The rest of us, who really use PACER, will however continue to be raped by an archaic system that violates the promises made when it was initiated and is excessively and unreasonably expensive. Last year Joe Lieberman was supposedly investigating and fixing this issue; of course as with most needed oversight from Lieberman, this went exactly nowhere. Why has there been no followup on that???