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Court administrator set to divulge private data to Legislature • Daily Montanan [1]

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Date: 2025-07-24

The Legislative Audit Division has asked the Montana Court Administrator to give it full access to all the raw data in a system called Full Court Enterprise. The system contains records from the county offices of clerks of district court. Besides the public records of cases in those courts, the system includes no less than 32 categories of data protected by Montana law as private, confidential, or privileged.

The court administrator has sent the audit division a letter promising to give that access this week.

Theoretically, the audit division needs that access to evaluate whether the state needs more district judges and which districts might need them. What is not clear is how invading the privacy of Montana’s citizens would be relevant to that legislative task.

For some examples, to assess the need for additional judges, why would the audit division need the names of minors; address, telephone number, and place of employment of crime victims; information identifying victims of sexual assault, sexual intercourse without consent, indecent exposure, and incest; DNA from criminal proceedings; child abuse and neglect raw data; social, medical, and psychological records of youth probationers; parentage raw data; interviews, reports, investigations, and testimony in parenting plan hearings under court seal; adoption raw data; grand jury raw data; investigative subpoena raw data; confidential criminal justice information; pre-sentence investigation reports, etc.

None of that contributes to assessing the need for additional judges, and if it did, the contribution would be too slight to outweigh individual privacy.

The Office of Clerk of District Court is created in Montana by the people directly in our Constitution, not by the Legislature. It is a county and local government office, not a state office. Clerks are elected officials responsible to the people, not minions of the court administrator. Montana law makes the clerks of district court the custodians of the records and imposes on them the duty to safeguard the data. Upon that lawful authority, the clerks have declined to give their consent to this invasion of privacy on a mass scale. They pointed out the privacy issue. The clerks are the only barrier between the people and this state government trespass into their privacy.

Instead of submitting the issue to the courts, which would be normal, the court administrator has brushed off the clerks and the Constitution in its autocratic decision to divulge the data.

Without invading privacy, Montana law already mandates that performance indicators for district courts and individual judges be updated and published quarterly. In addition, there already is public access to the public data in Full Court Enterprise. On top of all that, the clerks would would permit access to the system that would provide all the data and statistics that could be needed to decide about additional judges, but without access to data protected by privacy. Why is that not good enough? Why demand all private data about everyone in the district courts? Since it is not needed and not even helpful for the legislative task, why does the audit division want it and why would the court administrator divulge it?

Should we buy what they are selling?

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[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2025/07/24/court-administrator-set-to-divulge-private-data-to-legislature/

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