If you need to find court arrest records, you can do it alone and it’s absolutely free.  But it’s not easy.  You really need to know what you are doing.  You must know in which county court the arrest took place.  You will also need to know the full name of the person who was arrested as well as some other information about him or her.  Addresses where the person has lived, age, date of birth, date of the crime or court dates, Social Security number; all of these things can be helpful in searching for court arrest records.

You can certainly search court arrest records with just the person’s first and last name, but you need to know that there will be more than one person with that name in the system.  A middle initial is very helpful, as well as knowledge of any other names that person might have gone by, such as a shortened name, nickname or an alias.  All of these might be included in court arrest records.

If you want to find court arrest records for free, the best way to do it is to go to the courthouse where the person was sentenced and find out where they keep their records.  Because of the Freedom of Information Act signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 the courts have to make this information available to the public, unless the records have been expunged for some reason, but this is rare.  The courts are not required to make it easy for you, though.  They will direct you to where to find the court arrest records you are looking for, but it is not likely that anybody will help you find what you need.  You could spend hours, or even days looking for the court arrest records you need, often with little or no results because you aren’t really sure what you’re doing.

You can find court arrest records from home on the internet, but only some counties offer this information for free, and even many of those have limits on how far back you can search.  Typically these websites are limited either by law, because in some states you are only allowed to see court arrest records for a certain number of years and then they disappear off of the person’s records, or you can search back to the date that the website was set up, which could only be a couple of years.

There are private databases that contain information that the general public cannot get for free, if at all.  These are the databases that private investigators have access to, for a fee.  This is why when you search for court arrest records online you find so many websites offering to do the search for you for a fee.  The more information you want, the higher the fees will be.  Only you can decide if it is worth it to pay for a court arrest records search by a professional, but if you do you are sure to get more than what you could have found on your own, and often in a very short amount of time.