Rural-ish California counties sued for not providing timely access to court filings

Here's an excerpt from the story by Bill Girdner in Courthouse News Service:  

After years of petitioning for timely access, Courthouse News filed a First Amendment action Friday against court clerks in Merced, Stanislaus, Yolo, Butte, Sutter and Yuba counties.

“Since time beyond memory, the press has reviewed new civil complaints when they crossed the intake counter in American courts,” said the complaint filed in federal court in Fresno.

“During the transition from paper to electronic court records, federal courts and many state courts kept that tradition in place,” it continued. “However, some state court clerks abandoned it.”

Those who abandoned the tradition include a number of clerks in California’s Central Valley who are paying hundreds of thousands of public dollars to lease e-filing software from a Texas corporation. That software, called Odyssey, has three access options, two of which provide timely and constitutional access to new court filings.

One option does not.

It blacks out the new filings until court employees finish clerical docketing, work that is regularly done a day or two later. The blackout option is the one chosen by the clerks in Merced, Stanislaus, Yolo, Butte, Sutter and Yuba counties.

Only two of these counties, Sutter and Yuba, are nonmetropolitan but all of the counties are popularly thought of as rural in the context of California because they are agricultural.