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Housing Court Information Now
on Judicial Branch Website
The public may now access
information from Housing Courts through the Judicial Branch's website, at http://www.jud2.ct.gov/housing/.
Data includes information from
summary process eviction cases only, and initially, case data will be
available from the Hartford and New Britain Housing Sessions only. But as
Housing Sessions in New Haven, Waterbury, Bridgeport, and Norwalk go online
with the ForeCourt Computer Project, their case data will become available
on the Internet.
Housing Session case information
may be searched by: docket number, party name, premise address, court
calendar, attorney case list, attorney calendar, and attorney search. The
case information went on line this month.
"It is expected that the
Housing Session summary process lookup will be a big time saver for
attorneys and pro se litigants, who will be able to use the web self-service
style, looking up their case data without a trip or telephone call to the
clerk's office," said Jeffrey S. Hammer, Deputy Chief Clerk for Housing
Matters in Hartford.
Hammer added: "The clerk's
offices will benefit as well with less informational calls and more focused
requests for information. The frequently asked questions -- such as `What is
my docket number?' and 'Did my motion for default for failure to appear
enter?' or 'When is my hearing' -- will be answered quickly through the
web."
Chief Court Administrator Joseph
H. Pellegrino said that putting housing information on the web is another
way to make the Judicial Branch more accessible to the people it serves.
"The Judicial Branch is
committed to providing this type of information in the best way possible --
through the Internet, which reaches millions of individuals on any given
day," Judge Pellegrino said. "In addition, such a service provides
our court clerks with more time to handle matters that aren't as easily
answered."
The Information Age, along with
the success of the Judicial Branch's Civil and Family Case Lookup, prompted
the Judicial Branch to consider requests from attorneys and pro se litigants
for a Housing Session Internet lookup. This latest development is an
offshoot of the Judicial Branch's ForeCourt Computer Project, which started
in March 1997 as an effort to computerize the Housing Court's summary
process eviction cases with specialized software.
In January 2001 Hartford's
Housing Session collected information from calls it received. During a
one-week period, the Housing Session received almost 1,000 phone calls -- 68
percent of which would have been assisted by the eviction case lookup.
Branch officials met in June
2001 to explore the potential of putting eviction data on the website. As a
result, Joseph D. D'Alesio, Executive Director of Superior Court Operations,
authorized the project through the efforts of the Branch's Judicial
Information Systems and Robert Gorman of Relational Semantics Inc., whom the
Branch hired to develop the software.
A committee oversaw the project.
Members included: Chair Melissa Farley, Executive Director of the Judicial
Branch's External Affairs Division; Norman Ross, Manager of the Branch's
Computer Systems Support; Elizabeth Bickley, Deputy Director of Judicial
Information Systems, Applications, Development & Support; Don Turnbull,
Manager of Web Application, Judicial Information Systems; Suzanne Colasanto,
Chief Clerk for Housing Matters, Hammer, and Gorman.
"This core group of
individuals channeled their energy into proposing what should be included on
the Web," Hammer said. "Mr. Gorman did a wonderful job as software
engineer in taking the ideas and translating them into the finished project.
The Judicial Information Systems did a superb job in creating a backbone for
the web presence, overseeing the nightly downloads of data."
So far the response has been
very positive.
"It's really a lot more
convenient than calling the clerk's office," Attorney David Pels of
Greater Hartford Legal Assistance said. "It saves us time in looking up
the status of cases and obtaining calendars."
To access the Housing Session
information, go to the Judicial Branch's website at
https://www.jud.ct.gov and click on
"Case Look-Up Housing."
For information, please contact
Melissa Farley, Executive Director of the External Affairs Division, at
860-757-2270.
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