"I run back there behind the curtain and hit the switch," he said.
Hitting the switch delivers the court, live via video, to anyone with even the slowest connection to the Internet. The justices have offered this online access for more than a year now, and hundreds of "Netizens" tune in each time.
West Virginia is one of only six states to broadcast its appeals court this way. This Webcast, in turn, is only one of several ways the court has harnessed the Internet to connect people to this branch of their government.
An e-mail service delivers the latest rulings, summaries of recent proceedings and court news. An offshoot of the court's Web site provides a novel forum for the exchange of ideas, legal information and news.
And it's all free.
"It's my duty to see that the business of the court is free for the inspection of its citizens," Perry said. "It's the sort of thing that inspires confidence in the judiciary, being able to see the court in action."
The U.S. Supreme Court, which until recently had no official site, continues to resist cameras of any sort in its courtroom. Even audio recordings are rare. State courts have gone in the opposite direction, some more than others.
West Virginia's Supreme Court site predates Perry, who was appointed clerk in 2000. Since 1998, court staff have posted the justices' opinions, the judicial calendar and basic court information. The opinions available online date back to 1991.
One sign of the Web site's success: revenue from copying fees has been halved since the court went online. "I'm seeing that dropping more every year," Perry said.
The calendar now features links to summaries of cases on the court's motion and argument dockets. The votes in those cases are also posted.
Perry said the e-mail service is attractive to those who are otherwise daunted by the Internet.
"It's a kind of news service for lawyers and interested citizens," he said. More than 2,500 people now subscribe to the service.
The Webcast, with two cameras and its own computer server, cost less than $4,000 to put together, Perry said. It now travels with the justices when they convene at West Virginia University's law school and at high schools as part of the court's LAWS program. This fall's Webcasts will include the court's scheduled visit to Boone County, the home county of Chief Justice Robin Davis.
The court's newest cyber-venture is the Weblog. Also called blogs, this Internet feature started out as a sort of online diary.
"It's a real hot topic right now, and it actually started in journalism circles," Perry said. "It's a tool to support the mission of providing citizens with reliable public information, in a quick and collaborative way."
Weblog software allows the court's site to provide constantly updated "information feeds" for civil, criminal and family law news.
"This is a $40 piece of software," Perry said. "As far as I know, this is the only appeals court that has made opinions and news available in this way."
Each Weblog entry is linked so when clicked it conducts an automatic search of that legal topic with the Google search engine. The search engine also translates each entry into other languages.
Perry recently referred the media to the civil feed for information about the Kanawha Circuit Court asbestos trial. He then checked the feed traffic found that Internet users in Austria, France, Germany and Switzerland had consulted those asbestos entries.
"I had no idea how many people were reading these feeds," he said. "We just put it up over the summer."
Court staff are now testing a searchable online database that would list every document filed in a given case, and make some of them available for downloading. Though it should debut soon, it will not immediately provide such access to all pending cases, Perry noted.
Copyright 2002. Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
