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Cleaning Lady Mistakenly Trashes Court Files

POSTED: 6:46 pm CDT September 21, 2006
UPDATED: 7:34 pm CDT September 21, 2006

A pile of sensitive court files at the Juvenile Justice Center was mistaken for trash and thrown out, officials said.

Surveillance video from Wednesday night showed that a cleaning lady mistakenly picked up the box of files that had been placed on top of a trash can and tossed them out.

The box contained between 10 and 18 juvenile court files.

“There has been an entire docket lost,” said Judge Betty Adams Green.

Green said the files were critical to the cases she was to hear.

She said that the files contained information about child support cases and some of them contained sensitive information.

“The children’s names were in there. There may be some confidential information in the form of mental health information and medical information,” she said.

Vic Lineweaver, Juvenile Court Clerk said that every night his office delivers the cases to the courtroom and that the clerk that delivered the ones that were lost did nothing wrong, including placing the files on the trash can.

“It was not her fault and I’ll stand beside her,” he said.

A national audit of the Juvenile Court system from earlier this year found that the court clerk’s office is not operating at the level of quality to fully meet its responsibility.

Among the problems the audit cited, were missing pleadings and missing information and paperwork for cases on the docket.

“We started two months ago getting more control of how the files are more taken care of,” Lineweaver said.

He said he planned to implement new policies now to better protect the records.

Green said she hoped to reconstruct the missing files so everyone gets a fair hearing.


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