Member Advisory: Update - California DOB Redaction Amicus Letter All of Us or None v Hamrick
Dear PBSA Member

As you will recall, we filed an amicus letter with the California Supreme Court on July 15, asking the Court to take up the Fourth Appellate District’s Hamrick opinion on the grounds that it misconstrued several rules of court as barring the use of identifiers such as DOB and driver’s license number as search filters for use in locating online criminal records—with severe repercussions for consumers, employers, and PBSA members. The initial letter included 20 co-signatories, and we submitted a supplemental list on July 22 adding 13 more, for a total of 35 signatories including CDIA and PBSA.

The July 15 letter got the attention of plaintiffs’ counsel, who requested and received permission to file a “response” to our amicus letter. We judged this to be a good development, since it would likely serve to highlight our letter further for the Court.

On August 13, we submitted one more letter to the Court, which deployed the 2020 Census data released on August 12 to provide specific statistics on which superior courts had removed DOB search fields from their websites and how many Californians this was affecting (answer: 22.3 million, or more than half the state—so far).

Yesterday, August 18, we received word that the Court had granted itself an extra 30 days to consider the petition. While this minor time adjustment could well turn out be no more than a meaningless symptom of the Court’s heavy caseload, we are hopeful that it could signal we have gotten sufficient attention to warrant the case being discussed in the justices’ conference, as opposed to the summary denial that is the fate of most petitions for review.

The Court’s new deadline to decide whether to take up Hamrick is now September 30, although it is possible a ruling could come sooner.

We will continue to keep you updated as events transpire. Additionally, if you’d like up-to-the-minute information, anyone can sign up to receive immediate email notifications of activity in the case for free at this link—enter your email address, Supreme Court Case Number S269654, then click “check all” and then “register for notification.” (This notification service is provided by the California Courts; please contact the site owner for any technical issues.) As a final step you’ll receive an email which will require you to click a link to verify that you wish to receive automatic notifications.
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