California court computer boondoggle

The Sacramento Bee reports:

An effort to create a centralized computer system for California's state courts, originally conceived as a modest upgrade in a few counties, now faces total costs approaching $2 billion and is years away from large-scale implementation, an investigation by The Bee has found.

The project has ballooned in scope and costs since its 2001 inception without the scrutiny other state computer systems face because the state Administrative Office of the Courts is not bound by the same project review requirements.

The article says that the system is a boondoggle because the judicial branch is run by incompetents who resist any oversight on what they are doing.

We used to be able to get minute orders, names of court reports, and other such things by looking up cases on a web interface. But those features do not work anymore.