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Nevada Supreme Court justices will be looking at how courts statewide handle the names of minors in filings — when they should be kept confidential and when they should be public.
Current practices appear to vary around the state. Justice Nancy Saitta petitioned the court to amend its rules to set a standard for the court system.
The task of recommending a revised rule has been given to a commission on court records, of which I’m a member. This group in recent years has successfully updated the Supreme Court’s rules on sealing case files, how evidence is handled and electronic access to court records.
Although Saitta’s petition calls for a broad change to simply require all minors’ names to be reduced to initials in case management systems, we were assured during a phone conference Wednesday by Justice James Hardesty that any new rule wouldn’t affect juveniles who are charged as adults with crimes.
Otherwise, though, there are many different types of cases in which minors’ names are sometimes openly public, sometimes redacted, sometimes referred to only with initials or with first name and last initial.
They sometimes show up in the captions of cases and could be searched online. They may be inadvertently identified as witnesses or victims, in both criminal and civil cases.
It depends on the type of case and the jurisdiction how the names are protected or released, according to judges and court clerks from around the state who are also members of the commission that will be studying the matter.
Federal rule protects names
Federal Rule 5.2 already treats minors’ names the same as Social Security numbers or bank accounts. Other states apparently have similar rules, although I haven’t researched those yet.
There are also cases in which a minor’s name would have to be part of the record, and at least one Nevada judicial district, for Clark County, uses the name as part of the file-naming convention in its computer case management system. So there could be some practical problems with applying a new way of handling them.
Ultimately, as Hardesty suggested during the phone conference, a new rule may set a standard for release of minors’ names that is the converse of the Supreme Court’s general rule for court records.
The existing standard is that court records are open. They may be sealed only if a motion is filed, a hearing held and the argument made that there is a good reason to seal them.
For minors’ names, however, the rule might be that they are confidential and must be redacted. To release them would require a motion, hearing and good cause.
