Online investigation. Where to look for materials from American trials

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Recently, we told how the owner of the Avilon holding Alexander Warsaw became the main carrier of Russia. Warsaw, an American entrepreneur of Soviet descent, so that at least part of his biography we managed to trace the judicial bases of American courts. In this issue of the Online Investigation section, we will tell you how these judicial registers are arranged and how to use them.

🔎 Most of journalistic investigations are based on open data. In the section "Online investigation" we talk about the methods of investigation on the network available to everyone. We want to show how you yourself can check any dubious information yourself. You can send questions and topics you are interested in the author of the heading, the special correspondent of The Bell Irina Pankratova .

Tools

If in Russia all arbitration courts are combined into one KAD-Arbitr system, where you can easily find almost any commercial dispute, then the judicial system in the United States is multi-level. In the USA, there is no one or even several united bases of all court cases. Federal courts and state courts work separately. In one state, materials may turn out to be publicly available, in the other - paid or requiring authorized access. How to find out in which state to look for the case you need? Only empirically - from the context of where the events unfolded or in what state the hero lives.

If a person or company sued in a federal court, then you will almost certainly find this case in Courtlistener - a completely free archive of judicial data, opinions, oral arguments and financial reports of companies. Listener is the surname of the creator of the base of Michael Lissner , co -founder and executive director of the non -profit organization Free Law Project in 2010. For his projects, Lissner received a prize for public access to information from the American Association of Law Librarians. The goal of Free Law Project is to increase the "transparency and competitiveness" of the US judicial system. Free Law Project also created and updates the data database of the Federal Court of Recap Suite and the Bots Law bots collection for monitoring ships for lawyers, journalists and social activists.

Recap and Courtlistener have the same interface: in the search bar you need to enter the name or name of the company and scroll out options. You can narrow the search using filtering in the left column. At the same time, it is better to try different options for transliteration of the name/name. For example, Varshavsky or Varshavskiy write the surname "Warsaw" in various matters. By clicking on the case, you will see a list of documents with the "Download PDF" buttons.

These databases are mainly filled with documents from the official database of federal American courts Pacer . If the “Download PDF” button is active next to the document, then the creators of Courtlistener and Recap have already pumped out the document and posted it into open access. The Buy On Pacer button leads to the paid download page directly from Pacer. For such downloading at Pacer, you first need to register and wait for a letter from the United States with a login and password by paper mail. Previously, such letters are not fast, but they reached Russia. Now it is better to find friends in other countries and register an account on them. The rating for download is fixed - 10 cents for each page. The number of pages is known in advance. Sometimes the document has 5-10 pages, and sometimes - readings on a hundred sheets.

Another Pacer data aggregator is the Pacermonitor database created in 2011. It, unlike the previous project, is more commercial, and focuses on specialists, and not to social activists and observers. Its use is paid - from $ 50 to $ 500 per month, depending on the tools and the number of users. But there is a starting trial period. Downloading one page costs 15 cents instead of 10 in Pacer, but the search is intuitive, since it is often a non -trivial task to find the case in Pacer itself.

As for the trials in the States - here you need to start with the search for the base of the district court through Google. For example, in the state of Florida there is a Miami Daid District with a center in Miami, the largest population in Florida and the seventh in the USA. Accordingly, if the hero or company is located in Miami, most likely their affairs are in the basis of this district - Miamidadeclerk . This is a separate base , divided into civil, criminal and other cases. So, for example, from the news it is known that in the courts of Miami there were trials against the lawyer Donald Trump Michael Cohen in prison. He was also associated with the taxi Moscow business of the 90s-early 2000s, in which Alexander Warsaw participated.

Examples of use

Despite the complexity of the American judicial system, the volume of public information in it is much larger than in Russian. Materials of American ships allow reporters to release loud news weekly.

For example, at the beginning of this year, the Federal District Court of Manhattan began to publish several hundred pages of documents from the case of financier Jeffrey Epstein, accused of trade in socialized exploitation. Epstein committed suicide in prison more than four years ago. Through the legal system, by court decision, documents on Epstein’s relations with former US presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, the brother of the Britain Karl III, Prince Andrew, the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates, singer Michael Jackson, illusionist David Copperfield and many others, were published.

Even documents of such a level are published in the United States as an oath, which became the basis for a search on the villa of Donald Trump in 2022 as part of an investigation of illegal appropriation of the White House. Or, for example, in January of this year in Delaware, the court annulled the decision of the board of directors of Tesla 2018 on the payment of Ilon Mask salary $ 55.8 billion in the claim of one of the minority owners of only 9 shares.

What new journalists learned using open data

-The New York Times created the 3D model of the tunnel under the largest al-Shifa hospital in Gaza sector, which was captured by the Israeli troops. After that, the Israeli authorities published a video of the tunnel, indicating that it was used as a center of operations of Hamas leaders. Nyt concludes that Hamas really placed his units inside the hospital and stored weapons there, and also supported the fortified tunnel. But the publication failed to find confirmations that the hospital served as a center for management and control of Hamas.

- The analytical media center of the InSight Crime has published a report with a comparison of the growth rate of the volume of cocaine seized in Ecuador and an increase in the level of murders from 2019. It turned out that the indicators correlate among themselves. The source of the study is the data of national police departments, groups to combat drugs and ministries of defense, as well as the UN Directorate and Crime management. The publication is confident that the growth of drug production contributes to the growth of violence.

- The Hungarian media Atlo Team compared the temperature of the Danube River, flowing through 10 European countries, according to the temperature of 34 Danube observation stations. According to journalists, the river is warming over the past 50 years. The average annual temperature increased from 8.5–11.5 degrees Celsius in 1965 to 11.4-14.2 degrees Celsius in 2015. Temperature growth can affect the work of power plants located along the river.