Confidential Court Documents Not All That Confidential

Last week, CBS 3 broke the story that allegedly confidential court documents were lining Broad Street in the early morning. With a Local Emmy in sight, reporter Jim Osman acted as if someone had dropped an atomic bomb on Philadelphia and ended his report with “Someone has some splainin’ to do!”

Well, it turns out that the documents aren’t really confidential after all. Take it away, Daily News:

What Lawrence found were piles of criminal histories, documents that get printed out every day for each and every criminal case on the daily docket. Prosecutors, public defenders, the courts and private attorneys all get these documents.

“These weren’t official court documents. There was nothing confidential or sensitive about them,” Lawrence said. “You could go to the clerk’s office and get a copy of one.”

Thanks, Walt, for the splainin’.

Court records make mess, litter-ally [Daily News]
Aug. 18: Just Wait Until The Candy Machine Goes Too Fast And Jim Osman Has To Start Putting Them In His Mouth

Just Wait Until The Candy Machine Goes Too Fast And Jim Osman Has To Start Putting Them In His Mouth

This morning, early bird workers were surprised to find Broad Street littered with sheets of paper. But these weren’t, say, the copies of free alt-weeklies that usually end up strewn about the street. No, these were court documents with confidential information on them.

No one knows, exactly, how those papers got there. CBS 3 contacted all the major court agencies, but no takers just yet. Eventually Center City District employees cleaned up the mess, but not before reporter Jim Osman (pictured) took some confidential documents to himself and showed them to the cameras as if to say, “Here! Want some free social security numbers?”

Be sure to head to CBS 3 and watch the video, if only for Osman’s final line of the report, which is:

“We’ll keep working all the angles on this story this afternoon to see why, and how these documents ended up on Broad Street. As the saying goes, someone has some ’splainin to do.”

In Osman’s next report, he’ll end with, “One of these days, Alice! Zoom! Pow! Straight to the moon!”

Court Documents End Up On City Streets [CBS 3]
The Golden Age Of TV (News) [The 14th Windiest State]