![]() ![]() Although Case Search does not include case documents, it contains detailed case information from all Maryland appellate, circuit, and district court case management systems and allows users to satisfy many information requests commonly received in the court clerks’ offices. In announcing the additional records, Maryland Court of Appeals Chief Judge Mary Ellen Barbera noted it would help enhance transparency and access to information on cases that have been appealed.Ī press release from Maryland Courts announced:Ĭase Search users are now able to search for appellate cases by party names or case numbers. The Maryland Judiciary Case Search, an online database of public court records, will now include appellate court case information. This schematic diagram illustrates how this data is represented in the database.The public database of Maryland court records has been expanded to include case information from the Court of Appeals (COA) and the Court of Special Appeals (COSA). PGV: Prince George's County Circuit Court Civil CasesĮach different parser breaks down the case details to a granular level and stores the data in a number of database tables.PG: Prince George's County Circuit Court Criminal Cases.ODYCOA: MDEC Supreme Court of Maryland (formerly Court of Appeals).ODYCOSA: MDEC Appellate Court of Maryland (formerly Court of Special Appeals).MJCS assigns a code to each of these different case types: district vs circuit court, criminal vs civil, etc.), and whether it is in one of the new MDEC-compatible formats. Each new item added to the scraper S3 bucket triggers a new parser Lambda invocation, which allows for significant scaling.Ĭase details in the MJCS are formatted differently depending on the county and type of case (e.g. The parser component is a Lambda function that parses the fields of information in the HTML case details for each case, and stores that data in the PostgreSQL database. ![]() Version information is kept for each case, including a timestamp of when each version was downloaded, so changes to a case can be recorded and referenced. The full HTML for each case is added to an S3 bucket. The scraper component downloads and stores the case details for every case number discovered by the spider. Each of these queries is then split again if more than 500 results are returned, and so forth, until the MJCS is exhaustively searched for case numbers. Because the MJCS only returns a maximum of 500 results, the search algorithm splits queries that return 500 results into a set of more narrowed queries which are then submitted. It does this by submitting search queries to the MJCS and iterating through the results. The spider component is responsible for discovering new case numbers. The following diagram shows at a high level how each of these components interact: Each component is a part of a pipeline that finds, downloads, and parses case data from the MJCS. ArchitectureĬase Harvester is split into three main components: spider, scraper, and parser. Instead, use the options described above for viewing the data, or if you have an AWS account you are also welcome to clone our database directly. NOTE: Unless you are modifying Case Harvester for specific purposes, please do not run your own instance so that MJCS is spared unneccesary load. If you would like to download tables from our database exported monthly, you can find that at. Our database of cases (with criminal defendant PII redacted) is available to the public and can be found at, which is built using our Case Explorer software. It is designed to leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) for scalability and performance. Case Harvester is a project designed to scrape the Maryland Judiciary Case Search (MJCS) and build a near-complete database of Maryland court cases that can be queried and analyzed without the limitations of the MJCS interface. ![]()
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