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The problem with all of that is that the system

July 26, 2017 by Kenneth Newton

The problem with all of that is that the system has a lot of loopholes that can get in the way of people using the system. The court has allowed this by limiting the number of pages for PACER requests. In one case, the judge who was appointed to the bench by then-Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) said he would ask for more pages and would not be satisfied until he saw how much the court would charge. He then asked for more documents and said he would have to pay at auction. Byrd agreed to pay the judge $2,000 for all of the PACER requests. (Even though the court was paying Byrd $200 a page, it still charged "at most" $300 for each page.) In 2011, the court finally took the money, but only after Byrd complained to the president and then Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) that it was too much. The president and Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) took that money and went back to the court. A year later, that judge and his staff started complaining again to lawmakers and asking for more PACER documents. (In December 2013, they complained to Congress about being paid for "troubling" information about the court.)

Another example is the court's failure to pay PACER requests. In 2012, the court ordered the National Capital Commission to pay $2,500 to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit they filed seeking to recover $3 million they said had been paid into the bank. They argued that the money was not used for a cost-cutting project, but simply to protect taxpayers' rights to use the court's website. A judge in the case, Michael G. W. Ostermeier, made a big point, saying that the court never received its money. In the meantime, as the court kept charging him $2,500, the judge said he would not allow them to sue. In an email, Ostermeier said that he was "not surprised at the court's decision." W. Ostermeier also criticized the court for not paying PACER requests as "a convenient distraction" (which in a lot of ways was true). In a lawsuit filed at the end of this year, the court said it was in violation of its duty to ensure its money was used for the "best interest of the public" by setting up PACER.