Courts launching criminal justice data-sharing network
Deputy chief public defender says new system will save thousands of hours of duplication work
New Mexico law enforcement officers, prosecutors, public defenders and other government officials will soon have access to District Court data that will improve their ability to track when people need to appear in court.
The first dataset will be released next week through the state’s new dataXchange platform, according to a news release Thursday from the New
Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts.
The New Mexico Sentencing Commission created the criminal justice data-sharing network, which will eventually include information about people wanted on arrest warrants, individuals who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders, criminal defendant pretrial release and detention orders, and sentencing and criminal case disposition.
Administrative Office of the Courts spokesman Barry Massey said the data will be available in a common format that attorneys, law enforcement agencies and other officials can easily download into their computer systems.
This will eliminate the need to look up the information for individual cases on the state’s court case website.
Deputy Chief Public Defender Cydni Sanchez wrote in a statement that their office will obtain court dates, case information and filings from the dataXchange.
“Right now, staff has to input all data about a case into our own case management system,” she wrote. “That’s thousands of hours of work annually. This could save all of that redundant data entry and free up our staff to work on more substantive work.”
Hearing data will be updated every 12 hours, Massey said, and the frequency of updates for future datasets will depend on the needs of users.
House Bill 267, passed during last year’s legislative session, required the New Mexico Sentencing Commission to create a data-sharing platform for criminal justice information, the news release states. A $125,000 Local Criminal Justice Coordinating Council grant funded the development and launch of the dataXchange.
The Legislative Finance
Committee and the Department of Finance and Administration have recommended providing $500,000 in fiscal year 2021 to continue the statewide project, the news release states.
The money will be used to “cover the costs of expanding the dataXchange platform so more justice partners can upload their datasets and expand the data-sharing project,” Massey said.
While the platform will not be available to the public, the news release states, “the project hopes to offer publicly accessible datasets online to improve governmental transparency and accountability.”