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“Shadow .”

That’s a reference to the that maintains records of civil and criminal cases throughout Missouri.

Vigil is an adjunct professor at the St. Louis University School of Law and a staff attorney in its law clinics. He and some other lawyers have been talking among themselves about a problem with the database in question. The database was started by former Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce in the early 2000s and continued to be available after Kimberly M. Gardner became circuit attorney in 2016.

“We really liked that feature of our website because it allowed people to see what’s going on in their neighborhood,� Joyce told me. But the website, until Wednesday afternoon, had a problem. It included names, case numbers, dates, neighborhoods and criminal allegations that according to the legal system should be closed records. That includes cases in which the circuit attorney ceased prosecution after filing a charge, or the case was dismissed by a judge, or the case was resolved with a suspended imposition of sentence, which would erase the underlying allegation after a defined period of time.

According to Chapter 610 of the Missouri Revised Statutes, commonly known as the , those court records become closed to the public once such a case is terminated. The law includes an exception that allows a court’s final order or a prosecutor’s final action to be accessed.

On Wednesday morning, after being tipped to the problem by a local defense attorney, I performed several searches on the website and came across cases that Vigil says should have been closed records. I checked names and case numbers in and the records no longer exist there, at least in the public’s view.

That’s how it should be, Vigil says.

“The Legislature and the courts have gone out of their way pretty drastically to close these records,� he says. “Case.net and the office of courts administrator have done a pretty good job of making sure that this stuff goes away.�

Imagine being a person who was wrongly accused of a felony that was dismissed. You answer on an employment application that you’ve never been convicted of such a crime, but a search on the circuit attorney’s website includes information that you were charged, with no context about what happened next. The database on the circuit attorney’s office includes the name of your lawyer, and the judge and prosecutor in your case, the date of the alleged crime and even its neighborhood.

The mere existence of the information on the searchable database puts the stigma of a felony on their record, Vigil says, “even though they don’t have a felony on their record.�

Joyce agrees. She says during her tenure as circuit attorney, the database was searched regularly to check for cases that had become closed records.

“We didn’t want to put anything out there that was not an open record,� Joyce says. “That’s the law.�

To be clear, some of the closed records I found were from cases several years old, from during Joyce’s tenure. There is not enough information on the database to determine when the cases were dismissed or otherwise became closed records.

It appears that Gardner’s office, which has been plagued by staffing shortages, hadn’t been maintaining the database since at least 2018, two years into her first term.

After I alerted Gardner spokeswoman Allison Hawk about the issue, the circuit attorney’s office disabled the link to the neighborhood search function Wednesday afternoon.

“Recently, we were made aware of concerns regarding this information,� the circuit attorney’s office said in a texted statement. “We are actively reviewing this matter and out of an abundance of caution, have disabled the link during our review.�

Before the link was disabled, District Defender Matthew Mahaffey had public defenders on his staff search for their clients whose records should not be public. They found many, some going back to Joyce’s tenure.

It’s just another example, Mahaffey says, of trampling on the civil rights of people in St. Louis who are accused of crimes.

“The court’s and circuit attorney’s respect for liberty seems to have exceptions,� Mahaffey says. “If the people in that database were anybody but accused people, we would be outraged to the point of action.�