Lee Small (Room 1140 in the Wake
County Courthouse) directed me to
the 1st floor of Wake County Courthouse, Civil Section.
Their phone number is 755-4108. From my conversation with
them, I've determined the following steps.
Steps to research your
judge's previous rulings.
1) Contact the trial court
administrator (Lee Small at 755-4108 or lauralee.m.small@nccourts.org) to find out the case numbers of
recent cases tried by that judge. Its necessary to go
to the courthouse to pick these records up in person.
You can also download the
case information for the next week by visiting:
http://www.nccourts.org/Courts/Default.asp
The
information for Wake County is at:
http://www1.aoc.state.nc.us/www/calendars/Civil.jsp?county=WAKE
2) Go back Room 133 in
the Wake County Courthouse to pull those specific cases (looking them up by
case #). The records room will pull up to 10 cases a
day for you to review. I don't know if they will make
copies or not.
These records are public records
and therefore accessible by anyone. It seems like
persistence is paying off.
The Trial Court Administrator
(Lee Small) was very helpful. She provided me two weeks of
trial schedules for the Judge that I have been assigned.
The schedule lists the cases on the calendar for that judge for
a specific week. Each case is supplied an unique
identifier. This identifier is in the upper left corner of
each entry and looks something like "02-CVD-009741".
I took the schedule she gave me
and headed to the first floor of the courthouse. From the
schedule I picked out 10 cases that looked like they might have
a possibility of being relevant to my case. The number 10
is significant, because the Clerk of Court will only pull 10
cases per day for citizens who walk up to the counter.
Example entry from from schedule
The Clerk of Court is located in
Room 113 of the Wake County Courthouse. There is a counter
with a "Civil" sign on it. The lady show assisted me
(Lillian Miller) was very busy, but made the time to pull the 10
cases that I requested.
At this point you have to make a
decision. Do you view the case files at a nearby counter
or do you have the Clerk of Court make copies for you.
Copies of case files are available at the cost of $2.00 for the
first page and 25 cents for each subsequent page. Often
these files are very thick, so you may want to allow yourself
enough time to look through the files.
Upon looking through the files, I
discovered several things:
1) any document you
send in to as part of the discovery process becomes public
record. I was amazed as I sat there looking at
financial statements and credit card statements right there
for public viewing. What an opportunity to
become the victim of identify theft or other fraud! I
think I'm going to black out my information such as Visa
card numbers on my statements before I send them to the
attorney.
2) some of the cases I
read involved fairly extreme situations, such as
incarcerated parents or allegations of sexual abuse of
children.
3) a very comforting
point for me is that the judge hearing my case seems to
value the need for kids to have a relationship with both
parents where possible
4) I feel that it is
going to be very time consuming to get enough data via this
method to have anything resembling a solid understanding of
how the judge assigned to my case is going to respond to the
specifics of my situation
5) The most important
documents seem to be the orders as entered by the judge.
The documents created by the attorneys before the trial
contained a lot of information, but also seemed to have a
lot of spin and posturing.
However, it has been very
instructive to see the results and documentation involved in
other cases. I do feel that this is a good way to
understand what could happen in court, because this method
allows the reader to filter out the emotion. One problem
is that there is no way to know if there are extenuating
circumstances that affect the case but aren't mentioned in the
file.
All together it took about 2
hours to obtain the schedule, have the cases pulled and then
read through them.
I've sent an e-mail to T. Greg
Doucette at
Greg.Doucette@nccourts.org asking him if there is an on-line
way to accomplish this.
Finally, as one of two parting
thoughts, some of the files were several inches think. I
did have to wonder if there was a correlation of thickness of
the file to the cost of the case. For those of you wanting
the county's "do-it-yourself divorce" kit, it is available in
Room 119 of the Wake County Courthouse. The charge is
$4.00.
The website for the Clerk of
Courts office is:
http://web.co.wake.nc.us/courts
-- website for the Wake County Clerk of Court
