Mecklenburg Superior Court clerk struggles to make search warrants public on eCourts

A $100 million project that’s moving North Carolina’s court documents online is “saving time and providing transparency ,” the N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts says.

But in Mecklenburg County it’s taking far longer for some public records to actually reach the public.

As of Wednesday, 79 search warrants filed by law enforcement had been returned to the Mecklenburg Superior Court clerk in July. Just 31 were actually available on the eCourts online portal .

And those few records are an improvement. Before The Charlotte Observer reached out to the AOC about the issue on June 21, even fewer were online. On June 25, the AOC “advised the Clerk’s office on how to update security settings” and reassign search warrants to be publicly viewable online.

Clerk of Superior Court Elisa Chinn-Gary did not respond to requests for an interview.

A spokesperson for Chinn-Gary didn’t directly answer questions about why some search warrants returned by police weren’t public, but suggested staffing was a problem. The Mecklenburg clerk’s office, which “manages the highest volume of criminal, civil and estate filings in North Carolina,” must thoroughly review and redact each record it receives, wrote Brittany Foster, Chinn-Gary’s spokesperson, in an email to the Observer.

Clerks look for “personally identifiable information” that may need to be redacted in order to maintain privacy for victims named in public records such as arrest warrants and affidavits, she said.

Public records — and search warrants specifically — reveal some of the process police and government agencies go through when investigating a crime. When officers decide they want to search a home, computer or phone, they must first prove they have probable cause to a judge. That proof of probable cause becomes a search warrant application, which the public is entitled to know about in most cases.

Paper copies without redactions, Foster said, can still be requested in person.

What can clerks redact?

Before eCourts, returned search warrants were kept in clerks’ and magistrates’ offices.

Full names, phone numbers and even home addresses were often listed.

State and federal law include some rules on what can and can’t be posted to the internet.

“Clerks shall at least redact social security and drivers license numbers from documents before they are disclosed to the public,” an AOC policy for eCourts redactions says. And they have discretion to remove more.

Mecklenburg County’s clerks are going beyond the minimum, the Observer found when reviewing search warrants. Names, phone numbers and email addresses not associated with defendants are getting blacked out.

For search warrants — some of the rare public records that show how police do their work — those kinds of redactions are unusual.

It’s unclear why Chinn-Gary has been so heavy-handed with redactions. Foster said Chinn-Gary has “ the discretion to redact information from documents,” including victim and witness names.

Despite a lawsuit that she was previously a defendant in, allegations that eCourts has led to wrongful jail time and other issues, Chinn-Gary, who was re-elected to a four-year term in 2022, has not responded to at least four direct interview requests from the Observer since eCourts launched in Mecklenburg County.

As clerk, she’s the person responsible for the county’s court records.

AOC General Counsel Andrew Brown reminded Chinn-Gary and several other leaders in the local criminal justice system what is and isn’t confidential in a letter earlier this year.

Names, birth dates and information protected by federal HIPAA laws in other places are not confidential in North Carolina court records, he said in the Feb. 16 letter, which the Observer recently obtained through a public records request.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, the county’s Criminal Justice Services — an office that handles more administrative work and data — and others had worried that too much information was being posted in the new online portal.

“A primary goal of the eCourts project is increasing the transparency and accessibility of public court information and public court records, consistent with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and … the North Carolina Constitution,” Brown wrote.

Nothing had changed but where the records went, he said.

“The law governing access to court records has not materially changed, but the advent of eCourts involves a significant expansion of the accessibility of public court records and information,” he wrote.

Chinn-Gary says funding would fix delays

Some clerks don’t know that their search warrants aren’t showing up publicly on eCourts’ portal.

After a call from the News & Observer in Raleigh, Orange County’s Superior Court clerk fixed the problem and began posting search warrants. The clerk in Alamance County Superior Court said they are working on it but their office doesn’t have the staffing to get the documents redacted and uploaded quickly.

The Mecklenburg Clerk’s Office needs 36 more full-time positions to keep up with the filings and reduce the “delays, backlog and gaps in customer service,” Foster wrote in an email. Chinn-Gary requested state funding for the jobs during a March 1 meeting of the North Carolina Courts Commission. She also asked for it through city funding in February.

Mecklenburg County had the lowest staff numbers in the state for the amount of work they have to do, an AOC study from last summer found.

The state budget determines how many state-funded positions Superior Court clerks receive, said Graham Wilson, a spokesperson for the AOC.

The AOC “sought 219 additional positions for clerks’ offices in the state budget in 2024,” he said.

Raleigh News & Observer reporter Virginia Bridges contributed.

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