Dozens of felony cases in Broward County — ranging from burglary to murder — had their existence wiped from the public record until recently, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel has learned.
All traces of 272 criminal cases dating to 1988 vanished from citizens’ view. The defendants’ names and their criminal charges became public again last month after Broward Chief Judge Dale Ross issued an order instructing Broward Clerk of the Courts Howard Forman on how to handle the records.
Before the order, anyone checking those defendants’ backgrounds for employment, housing or other reasons wouldn’t have been told about the cases by the clerk’s office.
Forman said any mention of those cases had been removed from his public computer system after judges issued orders sealing them. That was the office’s policy long before he became clerk in 2001 and it had become clerical procedure, he said.
Criminal defense attorneys said it’s unacceptable to hide a file’s existence from the public. People who were interested in information inside the file would never have been able to request it be unsealed because they didn’t know it was there, the attorneys said.
In addition, if any of those defendants were ever called as witnesses, attorneys would not be able to effectively question them about their background, said Public Defender Howard Finkelstein.
“There’s no explanation for removing something from the public docket,” Finkelstein said. “You can seal something, but there has to be a notation that it was sealed.”
Judges and attorneys said parts of criminal cases are sealed when defendants agree to provide “substantial assistance” to police investigations.
The clerk’s office added the defendants’ names and charges to its public online database Sept. 16. The vast majority of the cases — 210 — involved drug-related offenses. Among the other cases:
Three were for murder or manslaughter.
Seven were for robbery.
One was for indecent acts in front of a child.
Twenty-three were for theft, burglary or fraud.
The Public Defender’s Office reviewed the names of 32 defendants arrested since late 2004, finding it had represented eight of them. Each of those eight cases involved drugs, and it appears the defendants had agreed to cooperate with authorities, Finkelstein said.
He said the assistant public defenders on at least two cases thought only their clients’ deals with prosecutors had been sealed, not the whole file.
Assistant State Attorney Jeff Marcus, who heads the office’s felony division, said prosecutors only asked judges to seal documents related to defendants’ plea hearings.
“We never knew of cases being entirely removed from the docket,” he said.
