House Majority Whip Jason Nemes, R-Middletown, questions officials from the Administrative Office of the Courts about the VINE (Victim Information and Notification Everyday) system during a meeting of the Interim Joint Committee on Judiciary, July 18, 2024 in Frankfort. (LRC Public Information)

A House Republican leader on Thursday criticized the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) for a three-year lapse in automatic notifications to Kentucky crime victims about their court cases.?

Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Middletown, the House majority whip, said the AOC should have requested the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to relaunch these notifications through Victim Information and Notification Everyday, commonly called VINE, during this year’s session of the General Assembly.

“We would have funded it,” he said during a meeting of the Interim Joint Committee on Judiciary. “This is something very important to us. I think we’ve made that pretty clear last year.” Kentucky currently enjoys a record general fund surplus.?

The situation, Nemes said, is “extremely frustrating” as he criticized “the courts’ recalcitrance.”?

Katie Comstock, the executive director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, told Nemes that “we only have so much bandwidth and so much requests” during the budget cycle.?

She pointed to the budget priorities that were funded in the new two-year state budget — maintenance for rundown courthouses, pay increases and mental health courts.?

“I would love to say that I have unlimited budget requests when I come to you all and have priorities,” she said. “I don’t.”?

Fixing the expensive problem

VINE was created largely in response to the killing of Kentuckian Mary Byron on her 21st birthday in 1993 by a former boyfriend. She thought he was still in jail on charges of raping, assaulting and stalking her. Her family had asked to be notified of his release but was not.

VINE launched in 1996, allowing victims and others to sign up to be alerted when an offender is being released from custody and when protective orders are served or expire. Victims receive notifications via automated text, email or calls.

VINE is still providing notifications when offenders are released from custody. But in 2021 it stopped sending notifications of court dates when the AOC stopped sharing that information because of security concerns. AOC officials had begun “to have concerns about the potential monetization and protection of our court data,” Comstock testified. She later said “we have no evidence that that was happening.”?

At that time AOC stopped sharing victim data with Appriss, which operates VINE. The system is registration-based, meaning to get notifications one needs to sign up for them, said Alexis Williams, the branch manager at the Department of Corrections’ Victim Services Branch.?

Prosecutors currently inform crime victims of court updates, be it by email, letters or phone calls. VINE? still sends notifications when an offender is being released from incarceration.?

‘We ought to fix:’ Kentucky crime victims aren’t getting automatic court notifications?

“VINE relies on comprehensive data from the state to provide timely and accurate notifications,” said Jarrod Carnahan, the vice president of Government and Victim Services at Appriss. “Data elements often include case numbers, court dates, event types, courtroom notifications, and defendant identification information.”??

“I want to emphatically reiterate that our organization does not retain search history or engage in any unauthorized use of registered or victim information,” Carnahan said. “The only use of registered data is in the instance we are legally required to provide it or if it is within the provisions of the VINE service.”?

Since appearing before a legislative committee last September and being scolded for the delay in notifications by lawmakers, the parties came back to the table to discuss solutions, Comstock said.?

Appriss “has proposed a solution that addressed those data concerns” from 2021, Comstock said, but it will cost.?

“They now want us to finance the cost of the notification platform to the tune of $500,000 for a one time implementation fee and $360,000 for a service fee for the first 12 months with annual service fees increasing after that,” she told lawmakers. “That proposed cost far exceeds any cost we currently undertake for comparable services.”?

And, she said: “we don’t have the funds appropriated in our base budget to pay for the service.”?

Another potential solution is to revamp the existing court text notification system for this purpose, which would cost money but not as much. Another hurdle: the court system would need to collect victims’ contact information for the notifications to work.?

“Currently, we don’t have victim emails and phone numbers to send them notifications and collecting victim information hasn’t thus far been a function of the court system,” Comstock said.??

Meg Savage, the chief legal officer of ZeroV (formerly known as the Kentucky Coalition Against Domestic Violence), said she hopes lawmakers can find a solution “soon” to make “notifications effective, efficient and reliable.”?

“At a point in survivors’ lives when so much is already uncertain and overwhelming, removing the stress of uncertainty about when they need to be in court will be a great benefit, reducing unneeded trips to the courthouse or multiple calls to and from prosecutors’ offices,” Savage said. “A well-functioning notification system will hopefully make an already stress-filled process just a little bit easier for all victims of crime in the Commonwealth.”??

‘Not acceptable’?

“At the end of the day, this is now three years the court system has decided to stop notifying our people,” Nemes said. “It’s their responsibility to do it and they’re not doing it.”?

Carnahan with Appriss said the notifications could be up and running within 45 days if they were to get access to the needed data immediately.?

AOC could not meet its end of it within that time frame, Comstock with AOC said, because they would need to make changes to their system.?

Nemes suggested the committee bring back the court system for updates every two months until the issue is resolved. The next meeting is Aug. 23.?

“I want to be very clear that it’s not acceptable,” Nemes said. “It hasn’t been acceptable for a long time and it needs to be resolved.”??