Court audit shows limited security breach of files

An independent review of sealed court files in Pinal County turned up a much lower number of incidents of unauthorized access than the Clerk of the Court alleged, but still showed a breach.

A review team from the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) found 6 percent of 732 criminal cases may have been accessed by the County Attorney’s Office or the public access terminal without proper authority. The instances of sensitive material being exposed may have been as few as three cases.

Amanda Stanford, Pinal County’s clerk of Superior Court, brought up the matter of sealed records in February citing “several hundred” security breaches. In the wake of the AOC review, Stanford said the review team used a much narrower scope than her office had in uncovering the problem. She pointed out the review was limited to active criminal cases.

“The findings of my office were more inclusive – we looked at anything and everything involving unauthorized access by profiles reviewing what our case management system recognized as sealed,” Stanford said in a statement.

County Attorney Lando Voyles said the results of the review are exactly what he expected.

Many of the cited unauthorized breaches may not have been views of sensitive material, according to the AOC report. “Specifically, the review team learned many documents actually viewed consisted only of a copy of the envelope cover for the confidential or sealed document.” That was the case in 93 percent of the documents (39 out of 42) viewed by the County Attorney’s Office, the audit found.

Through an administrative order in April from Presiding Judge Stephen McCarville, the AOC review team looked at sealed case records involving “drug/alcohol treatment information and records, psychological, psychiatric, neuropsychological and psycho-sexual evaluations, assessments and reports from any experts, criminal histories, adoption files, dependency files, and grand jury matters.”

The study “triaged” the cases, starting with 29,564 accessed cases. They narrowed it down to 732 cases with “unknown” authorization and eliminated non-criminal cases and documents the county attorney is authorized to view.

That left 124 cases.

Of those, the review team highlighted 43 cases involving 66 documents.

“Most of the documents potentially viewed without authority primarily related to psychological evaluations, with a smaller portion related to ex parte motions; in most of these cases, an un-redacted version of the document was accessible,” the AOC report stated.

Up to 83 percent of the breaches came from the County Attorney’s Office and the rest from the public access terminal.

“The report clearly identified that cases were breached,” Stanford said. “The ramifications are still to be determined and that is a matter best left to the courts to decide. That is the main responsibility of a Special Master Judge, who will be appointed to oversee any next steps.”

The report explained the clerk’s office had historically used the terms “sealed” and “confidential” interchangeably, and its system flagged both descriptions as “sealed.”  That meant some documents appeared as sealed when the court had not ordered them sealed.

That could be an ongoing practice.  Voyles said some cases are officially sealed by the court, which makes them off limits. Other cases are “sealed” by the County Attorney’s Office, making them confidential but accessible to the county attorney and his staff. They contain information the County Attorney’s Office must have access to by law in order to notify victims, he said.

“I don’t think [the clerk’s staff members] are making a distinction as to what should be confidential and what should be sealed,” Voyles said. “Until they make that distinction, their policies will be meaningless.”

He said just properly placing a Register of Action for the document would eliminate most of the confusion. “Everyone in my office is trained to know what to look for,” he said.

The County Attorney’s Office instigated its own policy on how to deal with sealed documents in May. It defines sealed documents as “those documents that have been filed and sealed by the Court, usually at the request of the Defendant.”

It outlines what staff should do if erroneously given access to sealed records.

Voyles said he had an emotional response to the allegations his office was intentionally gaining access to court-sealed files. “I couldn’t imagine it could be true,” he said. “And from what I know of the people who work there, I knew it couldn’t be true.

“There’s no reason for me to cheat the system,” he said.

The AOC audit showed some inconsistency in how the clerk’s office described court documents, which could cause confusion among clerks.