As of today, one can now research the status of PDRs and other CCA cases at its website. Hurray! This was promised many months ago, but the budget crunch kept it from happening.

Unfortunately, you cannot follow a link from the list of today's opinions to the text of unpublished opinions. In the past, one could look at a list of all the opinions, published and unpublished, for a particular day and link to the text of that opinion.

Today I had to search for each particular opinion using the site's search function. It's an okay way to go, it's just much more tedious.

It seems the CCA website has been swallowed into the horrible Texas Online format. Problems (please let me know your solutions):

-Limited to using Internet Explorer as the site is optimized for that browser

-How do you access this week's opinions?

-Everything is shifting to PDF files? Who decided that was better?

John Bradley
District Attorney
Williamson County, Texas

John: The fact that there is much more information available, not to mention casemail, makes it a lot better in my opinion.
For example, if I want to see if a PDR was filed in your Gerald Lee case (involving the perjured 11.07 writ application), I don't have to call your office or the Clerk. Instead, now I can just go to the website and see that Lee filed a motion for extension of time on 3-21-04 and that the PDR is now due on 4-12-04.

We've asked the Third Court of Appeals to publish the Gerald Lee opinion. We thought there should be a cited case that tells the defendants they have no right to lie about their innocence.

John Bradley
District Attorney
Williamson County, Texas

David:

There is a link to the issues on the CCA home page bottom center.

JB:

PDF has to work better than the WordPerfect 10 format the court has been using. I can't get half the WP10 documents to open, and HTML is just no substitute. PDF ain't perfect, by any means, but it is better than the status quo last week, I think. Of course, I can't get any of the opinions right now, so the format is irrelevant, I guess . . .

I like the detailed docket sheet information, although the JAVA menus are pretty slow on my system.

I know what you mean. One of the difficult challenges for web page designers is the fact that there are many different resolutions, sizes, and aspect ratios for computer displays. What looks good on one screen may be obscured on another.

For pulling up and reading each Wednesday's new cases, I preferred the CCA's old web page over its new system. Over both systems, though, I prefer the websites of (most of) the courts of appeal that allow you to pull released opinions from the "case information" screen, then read each day's opinions from a selected docket date.

That being said, it is still possible to pull up opinions from the CCA's website, it just takes way too much work:
1. From the main screen, select "case information."
2. From the "case information" applette, select "hand down list."
3. Select the docket date of opinions you want from the new screen.
4. Open up a second window of internet explorer and pull up the CCA's home page.
5. In the new internet explorer, select "opinion search" from the "case information" applette.
6. In the screen the pops up, type in the case number from your original internet explorer window (showing the CCA's hand down list for the selected day) of the opinion you want to read.
7. Click on the folder icon under "view opinion" on the new screen that pops up. (Be patient, it may take a while for the new screen to pop up.)
8. Read the CCA's words of wisdom.

All-in-all, 8 steps (using two windows of IE)is too much work. The webmasters at the Office of Court Administration (who are the ones putting together all the appellate courts' websites) should fine tune the "1998-2004 Opinions" applette to allow readers to pull both published and unpublished opinions directly from that menu... and they should do it soon!

What I did was just book mark the calendar pages for the opinions and hand down lists so that I could skip the home page. That menu system is not ready for prime time. I'll have to update my bookmarks each year, but it should work in the meantime. [Edit: my solution isn't working--they don't seem to be updating the old opinion page]

[This message was edited by John Rolater on 04-21-04 at .]

Just on a lark I checked early today, and the list was posted by 9:25 a.m. That's the earliest I've seen it online.

John,

I called the CCA and they will begin updating the old opinion page soon.

Bless you Allison! The other system is a little tedious. I see that the Texas Supreme Court's site has a system allowing you to access all the day's opinions in one spot, so I hope the final version of the CCA site either keeps the calendar based opinion page or has something similar to the Texas Supreme Court's page.

Last week I found the handdown online around 9:15. This week, I was watching and it popped up almost exactly at 9:00 a.m. Yes, I do have a lot of other work to do . . .

The recent promptness of the opinions is terrific. No more repeatedly visiting the CCA site or waiting for other kind souls to fax a copy of the hand-down sheet on Wednesday mornings.

But the TJOL service is just not very user-friendly. Unless you open every folder, you have no names or counties and no indication whether a case is published or not. On Andy Porter's recomendation (see old appellate thread) I did email the service manager to suggest some refinements--especially in light of the extinct written opinion service. If anybody else has a suggestions, please email them. Maybe if enough of us do so, the site will come closer to providing most of us with what we are looking for.

[This message was edited by John Stride on 04-30-04 at .]

I liked today's new dynamic handown list with links to the opinions and docket sheets. I didn't check the time, but everything was up by 10:00 am. One scary thing we have noticed is that our computers seem to crash when loading the court's Java-rich home page. Is anyone else having trouble with this? Otherwise, I was under the impression that there would be pdf versions of the opinions on the site somewhere, so that we would have slip opinions identical to the Court's hand-down, and I'm disappointed that I've been unable to find them.

[This message was edited by John Rolater on 05-19-04 at .]

The new handdown links are better. But, I, too had some crashing going on when using it. I also want to complain that it doesn't work very well using the Mac-based Safari browser. Seems to work using Internet Explorer. Baby steps.

John Bradley
District Attorney
Williamson County, Texas

I noted today that the hand down was on the CCA site at 9:39 am, and I received my email about the new opinions at 11:00 am. I'm liking the timeliness of the new site.