LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Kentucky lawmakers heard testimony Thursday morning on a crime victim notification system that's been plagued by outages since 2021, prompting prosecutor's offices to use their resources to notify victims or their families.
The Victim Information and Notification Everyday — or VINE — system, is supposed to automatically send notifications to a victim when an inmate is released or has a court date changed, among other important information. Katie Comstock, the director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, testified in front of the Interim Joint Committee on Judiciary about why VINE still isn't working.
"This is a problem that should have been fixed that has not been fixed," Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Middletown, said Thursday. "At the end of the day, this is now three years that the court system has decided to stop notifying our people. It's their responsibility to do it, and they're not doing it."
Back in September, at the Interim Joint Committee on Judiciary in Frankfort, legislators wanted answers from the AOC. A WDRB Investigates story in June detailed pages of VINE outages at Kentucky jails. While some were fixed in minutes, others took days, weeks and even months.
The AOC stopped providing data to Appriss in 2021 which runs VINE citing concerns over how the data is being used. Comstock said Appriss, the company behind VINE, wants the state to finance the cost of the platform, which could be as much as $500,000 up front and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual service fees after that.
"There is going to be situation where something happens very badly," Nemes said. "I want to be clear. It's not acceptable."
Representatives from Appriss also spoke to legislators Thursday and said they provide automatic court notifications with no issues in other states. Nemes asked Jarrod Carnahan, vice president of government and victim services for Appriss, how long it would take to get things fixed if they had the proper data.
"If we received the data today, we could have the system live within 45 days," Carnahan replied.
Comstock said it would take longer than that for her office because of changes that would need to be made to the system.
"I want to emphatically reiterate: Our organization doesn't retain search history or engage in any unauthorized use of information," she said.
But since AOC didn't ask for funding for that program because of other budget priorities, Comstock instead said automatic court notifications could come from prosecutors' new case management system which is still in the early stages.
"We must collect victims’ contact information for this option to be feasible," she said. "Currently, we do not have victim emails and phone numbers to send them notifications. Collecting victim information hasn’t thus far been a function of the court system."
Nemes said he's frustrated at how long the problems have persisted.
"There was no request for money from AOC in their budget that they just made," he said. "We would have funded it. This is something that's very important to us. I think we made it clear last year."
Comstock said they've looked at other solutions, including "reconfiguring our existing text notification system to provide automated court notifications for victims."
"While this option would be an additional expense not appropriated in our base budget, it would reflect a more prudent and cost-effective use of taxpayer dollars by using the existing texting application," she said. "However, we must collect victims’ contact information for this option to be feasible.
"The AOC supports victims and all their rights afforded under the Constitution and laws of this commonwealth. Many victims say they need VINE, but when you listen, what they are expressing is a need for notification. We look forward to working collaboratively to address their needs."
Meantime, victims are relying on prosecutor's offices to manually call them for court changes or they can look up the information online. But it can be confusing.
"I would suggest we bring the court system in here every two months to give us an update until this is resolved," Nemes said.
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