State of Idaho Judicial Branch

A colleague of mine recently expressed his frustration with the Idaho Court system because they’d made information public on their website (
) about his son’s recent criminal case, a result of a judge inexplicably unsealing the court record.
I decided to check this website out.
Idaho doesn’t stint on what information is available on their website when you do a name search (that is, once you get past the maddening ReCaptcha that forces you to type in letters and numbers on the screen that you can’t read).
So yeah, I had a field day looking up Idaho relatives on the website and finding out stuff that tends not to make its way into Christmas newsletters. I learned Aunt Lila got two speeding tickets last year, never mind that she is 93 years old. You go girl! More seriously, my one cousin sued her brother earlier this year. This is something I would’ve never expected, knowing these two.
Sure, it can be salacious and gossipy to know these kind of things, but my point is that maybe more information is better than less, because it reduces the possibility of jumping to false conclusions about why somebody has a court record.
For example, Washington State has a similar web site, but available information is very limited. If you look my name up, you’ll see I was a defendant in Clark County District Court in 2012. That snippet of information is the full extent of my case’s public record. You know, district courts handle criminal cases such as assault and DUI. Did I commit a crime of this gravity?
Nah, I was nailed in a WSP dragnet for going 65 in a 60 heading south on I-​5 in Vancouver at milepost 8, just one mile past where the speed limit drops from 70 to 60. You wouldn’t know it was a minor traffic infraction by inspecting Washington’s website. But I wasn’t about to shell out the $ 200+ administrative fee (or was it $ 300?) to keep the ticket off my record.