Miami County, Indiana Joins Doxpop Fine Payment

Doxpop is pleased to announce the newest county to join the Fine Payment network, Miami County, Indiana. Licensed drivers and others with traffic citations filed in Miami County and other Indiana Counties now have the convenience of paying these fines on-line with their credit or debit card. This service eliminates the need of making a special trip to the county courthouse to pay your fines.

The Miami County Courthouse in Peru, Indiana handle citations filed in Peru and other Miami County towns such as Amboy, Bunker Hill, Converse, Denver, Macy, and Mexico.  Major highways in Miami County include US Routes 24 and 31, as well as State Roads 16, 18, 19, 124, and 218.

Doxpop Fine Payment can be accessed online at http://payment.doxpop.com. Make sure to check out our website to see what we can offer you today.

Howard County, Indiana Joins Doxpop Fine Payment

The Howard County Clerk of Courts, Kim Wilson, is pleased to announce that traffic fines may now be easily paid online.

When ticketed drivers are ready to pay fines, they may go online to http://payment.doxpop.com and quickly search for a traffic infraction by name or ticket number, then pay the fine using a debit or credit card. The total payment, including an online transaction fee, is calculated and displayed prior to the completion of the transaction. The fines are sent to the clerk immediately and the payer is notified via email when the payment is accepted, usually within 15 minutes.

This service, like all Doxpop services, is provided without any use of public funding or tax money. Use of Doxpop Fine Payment is available to anyone.

Update on progress toward a real-time interface to Odyssey courts

Many folks have been contacting us to learn whether we have a better update cycle for the Indiana courts using the Odyssey system yet. Here's some background and an update:

In November 2011, we announced that we had started receiving monthly data feeds for Indiana Counties using the Odyssey case management system. We released this information to our users with the caveat that the monthly update cycle makes this court information much less useful than the information we receive from the CSI and  Courtview systems with a ten minute update cycle. Still, good historical records have significant value, and our mission is to increase the value we provide to our users at every opportunity.

We also announced with great hope that the Indiana Supreme Court had ordered that a near-real-time messaging system be made available on January 1. This would allow Doxpop to transition quickly from the monthly update cycle to updating information for Odyssey courts in the same timely fashion that we've been updating information from other courts since 2002.

January 1st has passed, and although we've been provided with a set of interface specifications for what appears to be a workable system, the database behind this system contains only a small subset of the cases filed in Odyssey courts. What we're seeing is encouraging, and there's no doubt that the programmers working for the Supreme Court are making an effort to complete their work, but at this point, a production-quality data feed is not available.

So when will it be ready? The short answer is that we don't know. Doxpop has begun development of an interface based on the specifications and data that are available, but clearly we can't call ours done until the State completes their work. Watch this blog for updates, and we'll let you know right away when progress occurs!

In the meantime, we'll still be providing monthly updates for the Odyssey Courts during the first week of each month.

Welcome to the Decatur County Recorder!

Today we welcome Denise Ziegler and her fine staff from the Decatur County Recorder's office to the family of Recorders who have made their information available on-line without using any public funding.  Both the index and images for Recorded Documents filed after 1993 are available through this service.

In addition, the Doxpop Property Watch service is now available for Decatur County at no cost. This service allows landowners to set a "watch" for any documents filed referencing their property, thus providing an early warning and deterrent for fraudulent filings that might be the first steps for identity theft.

The Recorder's office joins the Decatur County Clerk in making public records available via Doxpop. Court records from Decatur County are available for cases filed after 1997 are available.

December court updates released for Odyssey counties, Welcome to the Rush County Recorder!

The December update to court data sent from the State's Odyssey case management system has been released. During this release cycle, we focused on releasing the information quickly rather than adding new enhancements. Throughout the remainder of this month, we'll be working on enhancements that will be released with the January update.

Also of note: Today we welcome the Rush County Recorder to the Doxpop network! Rush County is the 20th Indiana Recorder to make documents available on-line via Doxpop, with an index reaching back to August 1997 and images available for documents recorded beginning in December 1998.

Thanks to Sally Neidenthal and her staff for becoming our 20th Recorded Documents partner!

Welcome Rush County Recorder!

The Rush County Recorder is pleased to announce two new services for providing access to Rush County's Recorded documents through the web.

The index to documents filed in August 1997 or later and images of documents filed in December 1998 or later are now available on-line at http://www.doxpop.com. Basic information about the documents is available at no cost. Detailed information and documents images are available as a fee-based service.

In addition, The Recorder's Office now offers a free property watch service to our community. Any person may sign up at http://watch.doxpop.com to set a watch on his or her property and name. Participants are notified via email any time a document is filed that references the watched property or name.

Both of these services have been provided without any use of public funding (no use of tax money.) The access provided by these services is in addition to the public access already provided at the courthouse.

For additional information, contact Sally Niedenthal at the Recorder's Office, (765) 932-2388, or Nick Fankhauser at Doxpop, LLC; (765) 373-9245; nickf@doxpop.com.

New courts added to the data flowing from Odyssey

The November update to court data sent from the State's Odyssey case management system includes several new courts. However, most are for counties already on-line, and are provided to fill in the gaps because of the more complete coverage of civil case types detailed in our last blog post.

The additional courts added in existing counties are:

• Allen County Superior Court 2 (Current probate cases.)
• Allen County Superior Court 3 (Current probate cases.)
• Allen County Superior Court 9 (Current probate cases.)
• Madison County Court (Historical cases only- this court is no longer active.)

In addition, Tipton City Court has been added and is completely new to us this month. The Tipton City Court primarily handles citations with a few misdemeanor cases each week.

Updates and improvements to data in 35 counties.

On November 26th, Doxpop updated the court information for counties and municipalities using the State's Odyssey case management system, replacing information current on October 1st with information current on November 1st. (See this previous post for a list of affected counties.)

Doxpop has been working with programmers at the State to get more complete and current information for these counties. Although the process of getting better data is slower than expected, we're making progress and hope to release the December 1 update on a faster schedule and with even better information. In the meantime, you'll be happy to know that the recently posted information is significantly more complete.

Here are the improvements you'll find in the most recent release:

• Better address information. In the October release, City, State and  Zip Code information was missing from about 60% of the records. We are now confident that if the court has this information for a party, Doxpop has it also.
• Judge information. The Odyssey system associates judges with events rather than cases. This means that no judge is assigned at the case level, but with the November release, any minute for an event involving a judge will name the judge as the "Judicial Officer" at the end of that minute entry.
• Better party information. In the October release, only the plaintiff and defendant were shown for each case. Many other parties may be involved in other case roles, and with the November release, all parties are now shown.
• All public case types are now available. The October release was missing Family cases (DR & RS), Probate cases (EM, ES, EU, GU, TR and CBCW) and public Miscellaneous Criminal cases (MC.) The November update includes all of these case types, and we now believe that all public cases are fully represented in the Doxpop database for these counties. (Note that *some* miscellaneous criminal cases are individually excluded because they are designated as confidential by the courts, even though the case type is generally not excluded.)
• Additional Courts. In the coming days, we'll be announcing the addition of information for several new courts. Details on the new courts will be in our next blog post.

What New Courts Have Joined Doxpop?

Here is a list of all Courts that have joined the Doxpop network since adding Odyssey Court Case information:

• Alexandria City Court (Madison County)
• Allen County Criminal, Citation and Probate (Now current!)
• Benton County Courts
• Bicknell City Court (Knox County)
• Blackford County Courts
• Bunker Hill Town Court (Miami County)
• Carmel City Court (Hamilton County)
• Carroll County Courts
• Cass County Courts
• Clark County Courts
• DeKalb County Courts
• Floyd County Courts
• Gas City City Court (Grant County)
• Greene County Courts
• Greenwood City Court (Johnson County)
• Hamilton County Courts (Now current!)
• Harrison County Courts
• Hendricks County Courts
• Huntington County Courts
• Jasper County Courts
• Knox City Court (Starke County)
• Madison County Courts
• Marion County Infractions and Ordinance Violations only
• Marion County - Center Township
• Marion County - Franklin Township
• Marion County - Lawrence Township
• Marion County - Perry Township
• Marion County - Warren Township
• Marion County - Washington Township
• Marion County - Wayne Township
• Monroe County Courts
• New Haven City Court (Allen County)
• Owen County Courts
• Parke County Courts
• Plainfield Town Court (Hendricks County)
• Posey County Courts
• Roanoke Town Court (Huntington County)
• Rush County Courts
• Scott County Courts
• Shelby County (Now current!)
• St. Joseph Infractions and Ordinance Violations only
• Steuben County Courts
• Terre Haute City Court (Vigo County)
• Tipton County Courts
• Union County Circuit Court
• Warren County Courts
• Washington County Courts

The Long Odyssey: Doxpop's 4-year Quest Pays Off

Doxpop is now posting court cases from counties using the Odyssey case management system online. This means that several courts previously removed from Doxpop will be rejoining us and many new counties will add their court records. This is good news for our customers, our company, and—we believe—for the general public.

A significant development in Indiana court case public access has made this extension of public court case access possible, more than four years after the first court adopted the Odyssey case management system. On September 13, 2011, the Indiana Supreme Court issued an “Order Concerning the Bulk Distribution of and Remote Access to Court Records in the Electronic Form”, requiring that approved organizations like Doxpop be allowed to receive delivery of the cases. 

Back in October of 2007, anticipating the conversion of the Monroe County courts to Odyssey, Doxpop filed an initial request for access to the public information (in the case of Monroe County this would have allowed us to continue to post their courts’ records on Doxpop, which we had done since 2002). Each year since then we have renewed our request, but have never received access to this public information until a couple of weeks ago. “Better late than never”, we suppose, but four years was a long time to await this proper decision.

Doxpop receives no public money to support our service. Rather, it is supported entirely by service fees from voluntary subscribers. Because of this, we are always looking at the bottom line and working to keep our costs down. The bottom line on this particular data set is that it is very expensive, because in an unusual policy decision, a government agency has decided on its own to charge more than the cost of reproduction for public information.

During the past four years, the Administrative Division of the Indiana State Court has maintained a firm policy that private businesses like ours may not make a profit when providing the service of delivering court data in bulk. In an ironic twist, the Administrative Division has now decided that although private sector firms may not make a profit on this service, the Administrative Division may charge whatever they deem to be the "fair market value" of the information.

We are scratching our heads over how "market value" can be reasonably determined in the absence of a free market. Even more interesting is the notion of a government agency deciding to compete in a market that they also regulate. This is certainly not unheard of- In fact it has echoes in the ongoing national debate over health care. However, it is an unusual step for an agency to take without the sanction of a representative body such as the legislature. We hope that, as the branch of Indiana government charged with making fiscal policy, the Indiana legislature might provide the Administrative Division with some guidance on this policy in the future.

Regardless of the concerns we have with the policies lurking in the background, the Doxpop team is delighted to be able to enhance and extend our database by adding these courts, making Doxpop even more valuable to you. Keep watching for updates on Odyssey data!