Not Every Arrest Results in Conviction

This case study takes an in-depth examination of when Cursory Indicator New York™ (CI NY) hits do not result in passable convictions. This happens more frequently than not, but what happens when an individual has a huge number of booking records and only one or two cases are reportable?

The individual we are studying had several booking records that we researched fully, only two cases were reportable, and only one matched the CI NY results.

See Figure 1 for the CI NY results.

As shown in Figure 1, this individual had seven booking records that spanned from 11/2002 to 10/2013.

All records are from the same county. The Onondaga County Jail will provide court information for booking records, but never the charge information.

The process of obtaining said court information from the jail requires a FOIL (Freedom Of Information Law) request, and then an additional validation of authorization from the candidate that we have the permission to request that information.

Figure 1 – Cursory Indicator New York Booking Records

When there are this many hits, sometimes it is more cost-effective to run the name through the New York State Office of Court Administration (NYS OCA) as a starting place to locate these arrests. Frequently, courts require a money order for each offense date we are searching.

While we did receive a passable conviction from the NYS OCA, we only received one.

Figure 2 shows the email containing the results found provided by the NYS OCA.

Figure 3 shows the actual results that were provided by the NYS OCA.

Figure 2- NYS OCA Results Found

Figure 3- NYS OCA Actual Results

Clearly, we were provided only two cases from the NYS OCA. One was from 1987 and showing in their system as “Not disposed” or incomplete.

As the PL 155.25 00 AM – Petit larceny was reduced to the PL 110-155.25 00 BM Attempted petit larceny, we are not able to pass both charges.

As shown in Figure 4, we reached out to our Liaison at the NYS OCA to see if they had any additional information about the charges that were absent from the results provided.

Our liaison provided eleven incomplete cases from Camillus Town Court, not including the case provided on the NYS OCA that was not disposed yet.

A case from Solvay Village Court was also provided.

See figure 5.

Figure 4 - NYS OCA Results Passed to Client

Figure 5- Correspondence with NYS OCA

Armed with this new information, many of these cases not listed in the CI NY results, we reached out to the court to obtain as much information as possible to provide the best results to our client.

We also reached out to the Onondaga County Jail to obtain information on the CI NY records. While we were not provided the offenses, we were provided the courts. After conducting the procedural research on each record, all the CI NY hits were either non-reportable offenses or sealed cases.

We reached out to the Solvay Village Justice, and the offense from 10/27/1993 was a sealed case. This was not a reportable offense, but the case was completed, which is information that the NYS OCA should have.

We heard back from Camillus Town Court on all offenses, and only one of the eleven was passed on to our client.

Camillus had been sent every detail that we were provided, and physically researched the court records in the archives to provide that information to us.

The rest had been pled down to violations, infractions, or were covered by other cases, which in turn were sealed or dismissed.

Figure 6 is what we could pass on to our client. Note that this case was not provided to us in completion by the NYS OCA, and was not a hit on CI NY.

Figure 6- Developed Criminal Results

End Results

Cursory Indicator New York furnishes booking records for individuals across New York State. Many of these records end without results that are passable to our clients. That is what transpired with this case study.