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ABOUT JPAW
When the Superior Court of Monterey County
shifted from the Criminal Justice Information
System (CJIS) to Sustain, Justice Edition in 2004,
state and local law enforcement, county agencies, district attorneys, and public defenders lost their
access to case management information.
To restore that access, so critical to the administration of justice, the court considered acquiring additional
licenses to Sustain or adding court staff to continue to manually provide information. Both ideas were
rejected as too costly. Instead, the court pursued an innovative solution—one that would
- Disseminate court case information with little cost
- Continue the exchange of data needed by law enforcement and other
justice partner agencies
- Expand electronic access to court case information—within the limits of statutes—
to private attorneys and the public via a secure Web-based application
That solution, the Justice Partner Access Web site (JPAW), began providing justice partners with access
to court data in December 2004.
In 2005, the court organized a steering committee to explore
how accessibility could be expanded beyond justice partners.
Because statutes and California Rules of Court restrict the
distribution of criminal history information and the remote
accessing of court records, the JPAW system had to define four
additional viewing groups: public defenders, attorneys, users
of courthouse viewing rooms, and the public. Each group could
access only that information to which it was entitled.
The court rolled out JPAW access in stages to the additional
groups, beginning with public defenders in April 2006 and
finishing with access for the public in July 2006.
To reduce the workload of court staff, the justice partner agencies were set up as system administrators,
who could designate their staff to add and delete users, activate and deactivate accounts, and reset
passwords.
The JPAW site has several features to ensure the
integrity of the system itself and compliance with
laws on access to information. These include
- Security features built directly into the Web
application to protect data
- Password logons and authentication on justice
partner views, so that only authorized users see
restricted information
- Built-in auditing and reporting of users and
usage
- Webtrends software to monitor and keep
statistics on site traffic
JPAW also has an online user form for suggestions.
A Justice Partner User Group, organized by the
court, meets annually to discuss improvements to
the Web site. The site’s design is flexible, so that
other courts can replicate the model with their own
set of viewing groups.
JPAW IMPACTS
- The JPAW site had more than 26,000 visitors in a
six-month period, with logons by justice partners
now exceeding 800 a day.
- When compared with alternatives to providing
access to court case information, JPAW has saved
the court nearly a half million dollars.
- The court has realized an additional savings of
$7,000 a year by creating a courthouse viewing
room in place of 10 licenses for the Sustain
system.
- Access to court case data has greatly increased,
especially for the public, which now has 24-7
access via the Internet.
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MANAGEMENT PHOTO
Darvin Monkemeier, IT Manager/Project Manager
Paras Gupta, IT Director -
Christine Ace, IT Manager
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