But at least the commonwealth has a statewide docket system for court cases.
That information is available online as the Unified Judicial System of Pennsylvania's Web portal.
Many states don't provide such access.
"We haven't really found statewide systems," said Robert Smith, senior research fellow at Harvard Law School. "Pennsylvania seems to be an exception."
Smith and a team of researchers spent three months scouring mostly county databases across the country for information on death penalty cases for the Fair Punishment Project's recent report, "America's top five deadliest prosecutors."
The Fair Punishment Project is a joint initiative with Harvard Law School and conducts research on the justice system.
Smith said of the commonwealth's Web portal, "At least it's available. Some places it's hard to get anything at all. It's 2016, so, you'd imagine it would be better."
The Reading Eagle checked whether the nation's largest states - California, Florida, New York and Texas - have a free, statewide court system in place for the public to access criminal records. Only New York does, but only for active cases.
"Our e-courts are forward looking: criminal, civil, family etc.," Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the New York state office of court administration, said in an email to the Eagle. "There is no archive."
But no state agency in Pennsylvania tracks all of the commonwealth's death sentences.
Over the past eight months, the Eagle has conducted investigations into the quality of capital counsel, the death penalty's cost to taxpayers and the distribution of sentences in Pennsylvania since 1978.
In 2011, state legislators called for a study to examine these issues as well as whether race plays a part in the imposition of the death penalty, an important issue given the U.S. Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional in 1972 because of its arbitrary application, especially for black defendants.
Long overdue, that state report is expected next year.
The lack of information, researchers note, is disturbing, particularly with such an important and controversial issue as the death penalty.
"The unavailability of that information impedes the effort of the legislature, as well as journalists, in trying to figure out as accurately as possible what is going on with the death penalty in Pennsylvania," said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
As a former federal defender in Harrisburg, Dunham has tracked death sentences in the commonwealth since 1994.
The Eagle's death penalty investigations required examining hundreds of news stories and more than 10,000 pages of online documents using the portal.
Before the portal system was created in 2003 at a cost of $105 million, case management systems varied by jurisdiction and at least one county without a computer system was still using paper, said Amy Ceraso, the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts director of information technology.
Her agency has oversight of the portal.
"The point of the project was to bring everybody together in one statewide system," Ceraso said.
Creating an integrated management system has not been without its kinks, though. Some of the older cases did not migrate well, or at all, into the new system, leaving information gaps for researchers.
Across the commonwealth, about 13,000 people use the portal, including prosecutors, defense attorneys and the public. But not many of those people, Ceraso said, are doing historical research.
Searches on the state Web portal are free and the public can request the AOPC conduct a search for data culled from the millions of records available. The cost for a data search is $80 an hour, necessitated, court officials say, because programmers must write code to fulfill the requests.
"As long as it's public information, then it's information that we can pull," said Kimberly Bathgate, an AOPC spokeswoman.
Bathgate added, "We want people to like our data and like our site and get the most out of it."
©2016 the Reading Eagle (Reading, Pa.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
