A few weeks ago, Wisconsin State Journal reporter Chris Rickert was using his cellphone to scan records in the office of the Dane County clerk of circuit court, when an office staffer informed him that this was not allowed.
Rickert complied, but followed up with an email to the office’s clerk of courts, Jeff Okazaki, noting that he and the paper’s former courts reporter had routinely done this to avoid the mandatory $1.25 per-page charge for copies made by office staff. “We have not been secretive about scanning the documents and no one else has ever told us not to,” he wrote.
Okazaki, in reply, explained that while the public can inspect documents for free using the office’s terminals, any copies must be made by staff for the statutory fee. He cited a 2014 opinion by then-state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen stating that clerks of court and registers in probate cannot charge for copies made using personal devices such as a camera phone or handheld scanner, but can “choose whether to allow an individual to make copies in this manner.” Okazaki said most county clerk’s offices, including Dane’s, promptly disallowed this practice, noting that the office has long had a “No Cell Phones!” sign posted in its records room.
But Carlo Esqueda, who headed the office from 2007 to late 2023, shortly before Okazaki was appointed to the post, says it “wasn’t my policy to prohibit people from taking photos of the screens in the records center.” He says the sign about cellphones likely predated the 2014 opinion and was not about preventing people from using them to scan court records: “My recollection is that we just didn’t want folks carrying on phone conversations in that room where people are trying to concentrate on reading.”
In my four decades as a reporter, always working for cash-strapped media outlets, I have rarely forked over the $1.25 per-page copy fee set by statute for court records. In recent years, that has meant snapping photos of court records, mostly in Dane County. If anyone had objected, and no one ever did, I would have simply resumed doing what I did, back in the days before everyone had cellphones equipped with cameras — copy relevant sections from the records by hand.
In other words, barring frugal requesters like me from making copies means additional labor and inconvenience, and potentially hours spent at terminals others might be waiting to use. But it will not necessarily generate additional revenue for the clerk’s office. (Rickert says he is now paying the per-page fee for some records and “taking notes on other, less important stuff.”)
Okazaki, who is running unopposed for a four-year term this fall, insists he has “provided no changes, updates or new policies regarding or related to the use of personal electronic devices to copy court records” and that any enforcement has come from “staff operating under existing policy and training.” He says there may have been instances in which violations went “unnoticed at the time.” And he wonders how anyone could see the “No Cell Phones!” sign and think it was OK to use a cellphone to take photos of records. (Well, one reason might be that this sign goes on to ask visitors to “respect others” in the room by exiting to the lobby to use their phones.)
But even if clerks are within their rights to adopt this prohibition, consistently or otherwise, that doesn’t make it a good idea. Letting people make their own copies, as the AG’s opinion expressly allows, is a harmless practice that reduces the workload of office staff and removes a potential barrier from people seeking to obtain public records for which they are, as taxpayers, already paying. A commitment to openness should trump the ability of government agencies to rake in money.
Court records are among the most important public records we have. Clerks of court should not be making it harder or cost-prohibitive for members of the public to access them.
Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Bill Lueders, editor-at-large of The Progressive magazine, is the group’s president.
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