Georgia Court Records

* Please note that some of these sites are not secure. Several, especially the jail search sites, don't have an SSL certificate, which is an industry-standard encryption tool used to ensure user websites' privacy, authenticity, and data integrity.  Your data could be compromised while accessing these sites, so exercise caution.

Atlanta Community Support Project (ACSP) intended for this page to be a bookmarkable quick guide, created to assist sister organizations and individuals advocating for criminalized people in Georgia. To make things practical, the table is included up top. In it, you'll find links to court and jail databases for Georgia's 30 most populous counties. Hopefully these will help you locate your people in jail, figure out when/if things have been filed or hearings have been scheduled, and gather court records, if you need to.

About the Table

The table is organized alphabetically by county. We’ve also provided the county seat and judicial circuit the county belongs to. There are 159 counties in the state, and 51 judicial circuits (hence, 51 district attorneys). Oftentimes, especially in smaller counties, court records will be maintained by a central office, which may be located in one of the circuit counties. Because Georgia has a decentralized court system, there’s a myriad of possible ways to look at court dockets to find bits of info or case records.

Links in the court portal column indicate county-specific court dockets, or court records databases. Many of these require you to create a free account to use. Though there are a handful of popular companies that create these court databases, these individualized ones are all slightly unique. Note: some of the individualized court portals were created by Icon. For those, you may have to go to the main link and click “Case Search” at the top to get to the search feature. As you navigate these Icon sites, make sure you select “Criminal” and format your search name as “LAST, FIRST.”

Each county maintains its own jail. In the table we’ve included links to jail search sites. Use those to physically find out where your people are. Note that, other than Dekalb and Muscogee Counties (as reflected in our links table) the City of Atlanta is the only instance in which you would use the same portal to look for someone in ACDC (the Atlanta City Detention Center and to find info about their pending Municipal Court case.

PeachCourt and re:SearchGA (also a division of Tyler Technologies and Odyssey) are comprehensive electronic records databases. All notations in these columns in the table re for criminal cases, though the same counties and other may use those systems for civil cases as well. Anyone can access these databases, though you must sign up for a free account for both. You’ll have to pay for individual records just like all the independent court portals.

Understand that not all counties use online records databases and, even if they do, criminal cases and older cases are often left out (because they haven’t been digitized and/or because the court clerks aren’t required to). In these instances, we often have to travel to the court clerk’s office to retrieve the records. But there may be another solution: GSCCCA, or the Georgia Superior Court Clerks’ Cooperative Authority. On their site, you can create a universal account and visit the eCertification Portal, where you can request individual court records. Keep in mind, to use this you’ll need the case number and exact name of the document(s) being requested.

Legal Considerations

As of January 1, 2019, thanks to SB 407, all Georgia state and superior courts have to provide a way for civil e-filing. Under the new law (O.C.G.A. §§ 15-6-11 and §§ 15-7-5), all civil actions filed by an attorney must be initiated electronically. But criminal filings have gotten caught in limbo. The two ways attorneys can e-file are through PeachCourt and Odyssey eFileGA (a division of Tyler Technologies). Whether counties contract with one or both of these electronic filing/records systems for civil cases, they may or may not include criminal cases.

While we're here, let's clarify the confusion about whether court clerks have to comply with open records requests. Clerks of court in Georgia are not categorically exempt from the Georgia Open Records Act (ORA)... because they're custodians of public records. But that tends to apply to administrative records (think budgets, employee records, policies). Records maintained as part of their judicial function are governed by the authority of the courts rather than the ORA. The ORA itself recognizes this limitation, providing that it “shall not be construed to require access to records that are specifically required by the Constitution or by statute to be kept confidential,” which includes records subject to judicial control (O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72(a)). Georgia courts have long held that access, via the clerk's office, to judicial records is hooked into the concept of separation of powers (you can check out Atlanta Journal v. Long and Napper v. Georgia Television Co. for more on that). Basically, to be consistent with this concept, access to court records is governed by court rules and orders rather than the ORA. Uniform Superior Court Rule 21 addresses filing, access, and control of records within the superior courts.

Lastly, per O.C.G.A. § 50-18-76, vital records are not available for public inspection and not available through an Open Records Request. These include birth certificates, death certificates, and marriage certificates. Typically, only people whose names appear on these records can obtain them, though children and spouses usually can as well.