Effective July 14th, 2003, per Section 14 of Assembly Bill A02106, the NY Office of Court Administration (OCA), of the NY Unified Court System expanded its criminal record history search. OCA modified what was formerly a single county search from one of thirteen counties in the New York City area to become a statewide, all counties inclusive search. The New York State Office of Court Administration-OCA has mandated that all criminal record requests made to the Supreme Court Clerk be forwarded to this office for processing. The OCA does not wish to have clerks performing county searches.

OCA will perform an electronic search for criminal history information from a database of criminal case records from all the boroughs and counties, including Supreme Courts and nearly every City Court. The fee is $52.00 per name.

However, Many Counties Still Offer a Countywide Criminal Record Search.
For those entities that merely wish to do a countywide search, in many counties they are in luck. Each county has a Chief Court Clerk (sometimes called the Chief Clerk of the Court) who is an employee of the State Unified Court System. The Chief Court Clerk duties coincide with the county Supreme Courts, which are the general jurisdiction courts. Outside of NYC, as cases are closed, the files are given to the County Clerk who is responsible for the public record. Each county also has a County Clerk is employed by the county not the state, and has duties involved with the County Court and also with recorded documents. The fact of the matter is that both clerks may “sell” criminal records.

It is the Chief Court Clerk, a state employee, who is forbidden to sell records after July 14th. Currently, the funds generated from these searches goes directly to the OCA.

What the County Clerks do is a completely different story. Until the July 14th mandate, nearly all of the County Clerks permitted the public to perform their own searches of the criminal records, usually via an index found in books or public access terminal. Also, some County Clerks performed record searches for a fee. Prior to 07/14/03, they either: 1) used the Chief Court Clerk’s computer/database to sell the record for the same $16.00 fee, and turn the money over to the Chief Court Clerk, or 2) performed the search using their own index and charged a fee of $5.00 per name for each 2 years searched, or $10.00 per name.

OCA Unaware of County Clerk Search Procedures
What has brought confusion to the situation is that the OCA administrators entrusted with instituting the policy changes literally had no idea about the County Clerks’ searches. The OCA did not realize that most County Clerks permit the public to search the county index and that a number of County Clerks perform record searching for a fee from a non-OCA database.

The bottom line is that in many counties the OCA mandate will NOT affect what the County Clerks do regarding criminal record searches. Although the OCA has asked the County Clerks to stop performing searches from their County Clerk’s index, OCA technically has no control over the county courts and their indices. Thus, many of the County Clerks who either permitted the public to do their own record searching or who performed the $5.00 record search from their database will continue to do so. The new statute does not impede these services. This is a real benefit to the users of criminal records who wish to have only a county search, and also to the hands-on record retrievers who will be able to continue to perform in-person searches at the County Clerk offices outside of New York City.

Please note that nearly all the City Courts no longer do criminal record searchers and send misdemeanor record requesters to OCA

An Evolving Situation
Indicated below are those NY counties where the County Clerks continue to provide countywide criminal record searches. In the NY counties not mentioned, criminal record searchers are instructed to contact OCA. Keep in mind this information is subject to change.

Albany
Broome
Cattaraugus
Chemung
Chenango
Columbia
Delaware
Genesee
Greene
Hamilton
Jefferson
Lewis
Livingston
Monroe
Oneida
Onondaga
Ontario
Orange
Otsego
Putnam
Rockland
Schoharie
Schuyler
Seneca
St. Lawrence
Steuben
Tompkins
Ulster
Wayne
Westchester
Wyoming
Yates



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