I have written in this blog and in my other blog dedicated specifically to discrimination against pro se litigants in court, about various ways how courts may and do frequently discriminate against the poor, indigent and unpopular litigants.
Civil rights litigants, especially civil rights litigants suing judges are topping the lists of "unpopular" litigants.
Civil rights litigation is all but dead - with all the barriers invented by the trial-level and appellate-level courts to "clean their docket", or, in other words, get rid of civil rights cases without ever reviewing them on the merits.
More and more often, sanctions follow against civil rights plaintiffs, victims of unconstitutional conduct of government officials, for the mere fact of bringing a civil rights lawsuit - and that is where the court dismisses the case without reaching the merits, or, in other words, the court punishes a civil rights plaintiff while at the same time refusing to see whether what the civil rights plaintiff is saying about being the victim of unconstitutional conduct by a governmental official, is true or not.
Recently, a brand-new way to discriminate against civil rights litigants was revealed.
Legal research is a big effort and comes at a high price in preparation of any appeal. Civil rights litigants often proceed pro se, especially in cases where attorneys increasingly are afraid to take such appeals, for fear of sanctions "for frivolous" conduct.
Online law databases, such as Lexis Nexis and Westlaw require at least a year-long commitment and are prohibitively expensive.
Cheaper online legal resources are often inadequate.
A cheaper way to do legal research (for indigent and pro se clients) was, as far as I was told, to do free research of cases on the Internet, by key words, and, when key word search returns a case on point about a situation similar to what you have, to go to the federal governmental archive PACER.gov and retrieve the decision in the case, creating a precedent and quoting the law upon it relied.
PACER.gov, even though criticized for its cost of 10 cents per page which is more than the federal law allows to charge (the federal law only allows to charge enough money to maintain the retrieval system), is still much less than legal research will cost.
Law libraries in courthouses exist, but often they do not have federal cases, necessary for civil rights litigation, are not open every day, be located only in large courthouses far away from where an indigent person lives, requiring a civil rights litigant to invest in a car ride and gas, not to mention to lose a day at work, in order to do any kind of legal research in such a law library.
Well, now even a research through PACER will present a problem, because it has been recently reported that some seminal federal cases, necessary for civil rights litigants' appeals, will simply not be "available" through PACER - because many "old" and not-so-old court cases are being deleted from PACER without much fanfare.
I had an experience in trying to locate an old case in federal court not through PACER, because certain information required for PACER was lacking. From my communication with the court clerk, I understood that, possibly, the "hard-paper" archives might not even be in existence. I was not able to retrieve documents I wanted in that particular situation.
So - several questions arise in connection of cleansing court cases off PACER.
If such court cases, which were already decided, are not available on PACER - where and on what terms are they going to be available? What happened to the originals of pleadings? How can people look at them?
What will be the cost of such retrieval, not through PACER?
And, with the increasingly dropping prices in "cloud storage", why problems with PACER had to be resolved by blocking people's access to cases necessary for research instead of fixing the retrieval system?
Was it to make civil rights litigation even harder than it is now?
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