Follow-Up: Rape Victims and the Champaign County Court
As a follow-up to this post there was a letter to the editor in the News-Gazette today (by me).
The Clerk’s office called me to get some more information. The previous Chief Presiding Judge had a policy when records went online in 1994 that no rape victim’s name and address would be published. When Chief Judge DiFanis took over, the policy either got forgotten or otherwise missed in the transition (I’m guessing in 2004) and the judge’s clerks (who are supervised by the judges and not Linda Frank) started putting in those victims name and addresses as they would in every case of a judicial protection order. Basically, the specific exception of rape victims got lost.
The Clerk’s office is currently working on removing the records out there and clarifying the policy.
