Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth issued this statement in light of today’s press release from the judiciary announcing an increase in PACER fees from $0.10 per page to $0.12 per page starting on Jan. 1:

“The higher fee the judiciary plans to charge PACER users come January is hard to view as anything other than price gouging. Court records are public information, so people should be able to access them online for free, especially when the actual cost of pulling up a filing is far closer to a tiny fraction of a penny per page than $0.12.

“It is also hard to believe that building a website for unadorned, black-and-white court filings and docket sheets could cost three-quarters of a billion dollars, as the judiciary is claiming. But we’ve seen this before: government technology projects get handed to contractors who charge taxpayers enormous sums for work that ought to be much simpler.

“That is why the project to modernize PACER and CM/ECF needs the kind of congressional oversight included in the bipartisan Open Courts Act. Management of the new electronic court records system should not be left entirely to the same judiciary agencies that, after two decades, are only now admitting the current system is outdated.”

For more on what building a new electronic court records system would actually cost, read this letter spearheaded by Free Law Project.