Backstory: Most Tedious Quest for Information 

click to enlarge

• Harryfn | Dreamstime

This "backstory" is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2022.

There are two ways to get copies of court documents in Vermont. One is to fill out a form with the docket number and records you're seeking, which cost 25 cents per page. The other is to look them up on the courthouse's public computers and take cellphone photos for free.

When my colleague Derek Brouwer and I pitched a cover story on youth gun violence, we knew we were stuck with Option 2: It would be far too expensive and time-consuming to formally request records for the dozen or so people we knew were involved.

But what the effort didn't cost in cash, it did in hours of labor — already in short supply in our line of work. There are only six of these so-called "public terminals" in the county, and although they're located within a mile of one another, half of them were consistently out of order during what turned out to be a monthlong assignment. What should have been a simple task became a needlessly tedious quest.

Related Warning Shots: Burlington's Immigrant Community Seeks Solutions to the Gun Violence That Is Claiming Youths

Warning Shots: Burlington's Immigrant Community Seeks Solutions to the Gun Violence That Is Claiming Youths

The fatal shooting of Hussein Mubarak on Burlington's Luck Street and the arrest of Abdiaziz Abdhikadir revealed a largely unseen dimension of Burlington’s escalating gun violence problem. Amid the unprecedented spike in gunfire, families that came to Vermont to escape conflicts abroad are now losing children to violence in its endemic American form.

By Derek Brouwer and Courtney Lamdin

Crime

Our starting place was the Edward J. Costello Courthouse on Cherry Street in Burlington — aka the criminal court. Not only is it close to the Seven Days office, it would give us access to paper records that weren't available on Odyssey, the judiciary's electronic filing system. Unfortunately, both computers were broken nearly every time we stopped in. The two at the family court downstairs worked, but one was interminably slow. The court staff — who have to boot up the machines, then remember the password to log in — never seemed particularly thrilled when we asked for access.

The security guard at the civil court on Main Street was friendly, though, and made small talk while he logged us in to the system. But he couldn't fix all of our problems. Our cellphone shots of computerized documents were difficult to read, not to mention a nightmare to download and organize. Hours of taking photos, one grainy page at a time, drained our phone batteries.

The most stressful moment was on deadline day, when a few last-minute fact-checks sent Brouwer scrambling for an open computer. At the Main Street courthouse, he tore off his jacket and bag, walked through the metal detector, and looked up to see a woman very comfortably seated at the only terminal.

"She's gonna be there a while," our security guard friend told him, not unsympathetically.

In the end, we got all the documents we needed, but the process left me convinced that it shouldn't be so onerous to access public information — for a reporter or anyone else. A committee of Vermont journalists is currently working on this problem, and I'm fortunate enough to be at the table. I have stories to tell.