Access to Court Records in Alabama
Viewing Alabama Supreme Court & Appellate Court Records
Alabama Supreme Court and appellate court decisions are freely available through Justia. District and circuit court records must be purchased.
Purchasing District & Circuit Court Records
Animal cruelty cases are heard in district court or circuit court. To view these records, you have the choice of purchasing paper copies from the circuit clerk’s office or purchasing digital files online through Alacourt.com (Just One Look), a state-contracted business.
To purchase paper copies from the circuit clerk’s office:
- Fees: The per-case fee is $5 for up to 20 pages plus 50¢ for additional pages. If the records are printed double sided, each printed side may be counted as a page.
- Choosing Records: Each courthouse should be a public terminal on which you can freely lookup a name or case number and choose which records to purchase, according to my June 5, 2025 conversation with an official at the Alabama Administrative Office of Courts. If no terminal is available, you should be allowed to view the clerk’s terminal to make your choice. The list of documents includes a date, number of pages, and title for each document. In my county, the public terminal is acessible only when court is not in session, so you may wish to ask about availability before traveling to the courthouse.
- Requesting in Advance: The clerk may not necessarily be able to print records while you wait. So, you may also wish to request records over the phone before driving to the courthouse.
To purchase digital files online: Digital records are available through Just One Look, which charges the fees above plus a $10 fee for each search of a name or case number, even if there are no matches. (Searches are included in subscriptions, which start at $84 per month plus a $150 setup fee, plus the same per-case fees as above.)
Municipal Court Records
If you are seeking municipal court records, call to ask how to access records.
Questions of Equity & Transparency
Why is the DIY, paperless option pricier than the version that consumes employee time and supplies? Why should the public have to choose between significantly higher fees or a significant use of their time (driving to the courthouse and waiting for or making another trip to pickup)?
Whether online or in person, cases can be searched only by name or case number, according to the representative I asked in the Blount County Clerk’s Office; it is not possible to search by keyword, by charge (statute), or by any other criteria. This means that even though animal cruelty (and all other) cases are public record, reporters and the public remain unaware unless information is provided by someone involved, such as law enforcement, shelter staff, or the district attorney’s office.