HELENA -- Use a debit card in Montana and the bank has a record of it within moments.

But if you're convicted of a felony, keepers of the state's largest criminal database may not learn of it for 30 days. Or if you file a suit before the Montana Supreme Court, you can blow off legal deadlines for weeks and no one will know.

That's because most legal information in the state is still stored as paper documents, said Chief Justice Karla Gray, head of the Montana court system. The system makes it difficult for police officers, deputies and judges to easily share information about convictions and court proceedings and harder for the public to find out what's going on in Montana's courts.

"It's Stone Age," Gray said.

She's hoping the 2005 Legislature will spend $4.8 million to modernize technology for the Supreme Court and the rest of the Montana legal system. Outgoing Gov. Judy Martz included no money for legal system technology in her proposed budget, and Gov.-elect Brian Schweitzer has said he hasn't yet finalized his budget and didn't know for sure what would be in it.

Montana has courthouses in all 56 counties. But the courthouses aren't linked together electronically, making their legal records difficult to share, said Jim Oppedahl, court administrator. Some courthouses don't maintain any electronic records and still record convictions, marriages and other legal matters by hand in massive, leather-bound books once common in legal record keeping but now considered old-fashioned.

The Department of Justice maintains a database of all criminal convictions, Oppedahl said. Without it, there'd be no way to find out if someone was convicted of a felony short of personally checking the records in all 56 counties. But the current system is hampered by the lack of technology, Oppedahl said.

All criminal convictions and updates in criminal proceedings are noted in hand-written forms by courthouse workers in all 56 counties, said Nancy Bloom, chief of the Criminal Justice Information Services Bureau at the Justice Department. Those paper documents are then mailed to the Justice Department headquarters in Helena where four workers spend all day opening envelopes and typing legal information into the database. Right now, said Stacye Dorrington, supervisor of the Justice Department's criminal records and identification services office, there is no way for District Courts to share the information electronically with the Justice Department.

Law enforcement agencies have 10 days to mail records of arrests and other criminal information to the database headquarters and District Courts have 30 days to mail their records, Dorrington said. But it's still possible for someone to be arrested and released in one county and be arrested for a new crime somewhere else and the arresting officers would have no way of knowing about the prior arrest, Dorrington said.

(Note to would-be criminals: Eventually, the Justice Department record keepers do learn of your criminal history.)

The Justice Department wants to modernize the current system by allowing courts to submit information through a Web site, Dorrington said, but the agency doesn't have the money.

Lack of technology is also a problem difficult at the Supreme Court, Gray said.

All cases are filed before the court as paper documents. Court workers then manually re-type basic information from the case into a database using software purchased in 1989, Gray said. But the software only allows Supreme Court workers to note that a case has been filed and to note what documents have been filed in the case. It cannot track the status of each file and cannot automatically remind the justices when certain documents need to be filed in certain cases.

The only way to do that is to manually read through the records of each case to make sure lawyers are filing documents on time, Gray said. So far, there's been about 820 cases filed before the Supreme Court this year, cases that Gray manually checks periodically to make sure lawyers are working on schedule.

"There are delays everywhere, at every stage," she said.

Courts are allowed to assess a surcharge on certain proceedings to pay to update technology, Oppedahl said. But the court's ability to charge the fees expires in June and must be extended by the Legislature every two years.

"So, I can't enter into long term contracts," Oppedahl said.

Gray said the courts need to have long term reliable funding for something as basic as computers and software.

Chuck Swysgood, Martz's budget director, said the governor didn't include money for court technology because the courts had started updating technology with the surcharge system and should finish with the surcharge system. However, there is money in the governor's proposed budget to pay the hefty licensing fees for special legal system software.

Schweitzer said he's not necessarily against spending money on court technology, but the state's budget must balance. The state's budget is like a balloon, he said. If you want to expand one part of the balloon, you've got to squeeze air from some place else.

"We're still squeezing," he said.

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