The U.S. Department of Justice complains that Georgia, along with other states, is not providing complete information to a national criminal database. And it says this puts public safety at risk.
According to a letter U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent recently to Gov. Nathan Deal and Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, 28 percent of the Georgia arrest records entered into the national criminal history database show no final dispositions — i.e., whether defendants were convicted or acquitted.
But when Sessions’ letter arrived, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was already in the midst of a project to collect dispositions on millions of charges that have never been recorded.
Nationwide, 32 percent of all criminal records are lacking a final disposition, according to the Sessions letter.
“We are operating on an information deficit,” Sessions wrote in the March 13 letter, which The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained under the Georgia Open Records Act.
“The danger to public safety as a result of this lack of information is extraordinary,” Sessions wrote. “Our nation’s law enforcement officers rely on the information in these national-level databases, and anything but the most accurate, complete and up-to-date information puts them, and all Americans, at risk.”
The GBI’s Georgia Crime Information Center (GCIC) collects criminal data from law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and the courts, and feeds those records into various national databases and systems that are checked by employers, law enforcement, firearms sellers, and agencies that provide professional licenses and gun-carry permits.
“When the information upon which it relies is incomplete, we risk allowing the transfer of a firearm to a person who is prohibited by law from possession,” Sessions wrote. “This is a result we simply cannot tolerate.”
GBI Director Vernon Keenan agrees, noting that Georgia was addressing the situation even before Sessions' letter was sent.
“We’re ahead of many states, but we’re not where we need to be,” Keenan said. “If the government is going to create records on their citizens, they need to be accurate. This important criminal record system was designed for us by the criminal justice system, but it has evolved into being important records for employment. A number of occupations require criminal history checks. … When they’re not (complete), research has to be done on each individual to correct those records.”
The GBI’s Computerized Criminal History database contains records of 14.4 million arrests on more than 23.3 million charges. Of those 23.3 million charges, 7.5 million don’t have dispositions noted.
Complicating the problem is arrest records are no longer available for employment or licensing purposes after a specified amount of time has passed — two years for misdemeanors, four years for felonies, and seven years for sexually violent crimes and violent felonies.
There are 6.1 million charges with no disposition in the state’s database that potential employers cannot see because of the time that has passed. Most of them are decades old.
GBI-hired contractors have already searched courthouses in DeKalb, Cobb, Chatham, Bibb and Clayton counties for records on the final outcome of arrests made in those jurisdictions. The work is ongoing in Fulton County, which accounts for 1.5 million of Georgia’s open cases with no dispositions.
Since 2013, dispositions on 90,000 serious felony charges have been recovered, and half of them were convictions, according to the GBI.
Michael Holiman, executive director of the Council of Superior Court Clerks, believes the problem is the software used to track charges. And he said the missing information does not necessarily spell danger.
As a case moves through the criminal justice system, charges brought by police can be shuffled around — the first charge becoming the second, the second charge becoming the first, etc. — or even dropped by prosecutors, Holiman said. And once cases are resolved in court, the original charges may be changed to different offenses, or they can be reordered or not prosecuted at all, he said.
The result: Such changes throw a monkey wrench into the GBI’s Georgia Crime Information Center (GCIC).
The GCIC system “requires that the charges that (people) were convicted on line up,” Holiman said. “To get (the GBI’s) charge-based system to accept the transmission, somebody has to go in and reconcile the arrest record with the conviction system. The (district attorneys) won’t do it. Some clerks can’t do it or won’t do it. Some of the courts have just not had the manpower to do that. There have been successes where the DA’s staff and clerks’ office staff have gotten together to do this. But there are a lot of cases that got into the past-due column and (we) never could catch up. It’s too darn voluminous.”
Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecution Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said most district attorneys don’t have the staff to go through old records in search of the disposition of old charges, and that in most instances it is the clerks of court that send that information to the GBI. Sometimes, however, people will come to the offices of the district attorneys with questions about why the disposition of charges, mostly in instances where they were dropped, were not entered into the national database.
“We are working on it,” Skandalakis said. “We don’t have the resources to go back and look at each of these cases. Some (district attorneys) don’t have the ability to do it and most are doing it on a case-by-case basis.”
Sessions wrote in his letter that there could be federal funds or programs to help.
“I am committed to doing everything in my authority to make inroads against this intractable problem,” Sessions wrote.
“The safety and security of our nation depends on our collective efforts to rise to this challenge and overcome the obstacles to complete information sharing,” he wrote. “… As public servants, it is incumbent upon us to dutifully enforce the law and protect the public.”
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