Deferred Prosecution Agreement Record Can Be Found by Another Party
Video Transcribed: Can somebody find my deferred prosecution agreement record? I’m Oklahoma lawyer James Wirth, doing a series of videos related to deferred prosecution agreements. And this one deals with how public those are. Can somebody find that?
One of the benefits of doing a deferred prosecution agreement is that it’s not filed with the court, it’s in the DA’s file. So you’ve got your copy. What the agreement is, the DA has the copy, and it’s generally not publicly available. However, can it be found? The answer is yes.
While you are still under deferred prosecution agreement, going through those requirements, which last up to a maximum, by statute, of three years. So during that time period, up to a maximum of three years, that information can be found if somebody submits an Open Records Act request for those DA documents. And the DA is required by law to turn those ove
r. That information can be publicly available from an Open Records Act request.
However, those are not super common that those would be done. And not just anybody can do it in two seconds, and search it online as if it were filed with the court. They have to file the appropriate documents, and then wait for the DA to process those, and then get those. However, that’s not available always.
Once you’ve completed the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement, if you do so successfully, and that time clock has run out, once that is done, then those are no longer available for the DA to hand over through an Open Records Act request. And then is something that the DA does not hand over, and therefore, it is confidential. It should not leak out to the public.
So if you’ve got any questions about deferred prosecution agreements, whether they’re right for you, or an option for you, you’re going to want to talk to an attorney about that privately and confidentially. To get that scheduled with a Tulsa Criminal Defense Attorney at my office, you go online to makelaweasy.com.
