I’m researching a situation where a local resident was charged with violating a town code ordinance. The town judge dismissed the case as facially insufficient. When I requested the judge’s name and a copy of the ruling from the town court, the clerk said the case was sealed due to the dismissal and that she could not share any information.
This raises a few questions:
What is the public purpose behind sealing a dismissed case?
Is it true that if the judge had ruled in favor of the town, the case might not have been sealed?
Are court records completely off-limits under the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)? Or are there other ways the public can access information about the justice system?
I’d appreciate any insight into how transparency and privacy intersect when it comes to local court proceedings.
I have seen this come up before. Under the Criminal Procedure Law, charges against an accused that are dismissed in favor of the accused are sealed and not subject to public disclosure.
https://docs.dos.ny.gov/coog/ftext/f19123.html
Although the courts are not subject to FOIL, most court records are available to the public pursuant to other provisions of law. Notable among these are §§255 and 255-b of the Judiciary Law. The former states, in brief, that records maintained by a clerk of a court are public. The latter, entitled “Dockets of clerks to be public,” provides that “A docket-book, kept by a clerk of a court, must be kept open, during the business hours fixed by law, for search and examination by any person.”
Also important, particularly in relation to municipalities, is §2019-a of the Uniform Justice Court Act, which applies to town and village justice courts, and generally requires that records maintained by those courts are public, unless a separate statute indicates that particular records are confidential or sealed.
