Chapter 74: Retention Schedule
A retention schedule is a table.
It has four columns. Record series. Description. Retention period. Disposition.
Every agency in the state has one. They are public. Nobody reads them.
I read the State Police schedule on a library computer on a Tuesday, with forty minutes left on my session.
Record series 14-6 was Crash Investigation Reports. Retention: permanent.
Record series 14-7 was Crash Investigation Supporting Materials.
Retention: five years from case closure. Disposition: destroy.
The description column for 14-7 listed what counted as supporting materials.
Field measurement notes. Total station survey data. Scale diagrams. Vehicle inspection worksheets. Photographic negatives and digital originals. Downloaded electronic data.
Five years.
I was convicted at the end of my first year. The case closed on the day the appeal window ran out.
Five years after that was fourteen months ago.
I sat back. The woman beside me turned her cooking video down without being asked.
I want to be exact about what I felt, because I have been wrong about my own feelings before and I am trying not to be.
I did not feel despair. I felt the specific dullness of arriving at a counter after it has closed.
They had not hidden anything from me.
They had waited, and the clock did the work, and no human being had to decide anything.
That is the part nobody tells you.
A file is not destroyed by an enemy. It is destroyed by a schedule that was approved eleven years ago by a records committee that met four times a year.
I printed the schedule. Ten cents a page, six pages, sixty cents. I put it in the folder.
Then I did the thing I had learned from four hundred pages a day.
I looked for where else a copy of a destroyed document might live.
Because documents are copied. That is what documents are for.
The reconstruction report goes to the prosecutor. The prosecutor's file has its own schedule.
The report goes to the defense. My defense was a public defender named Alan Kessler who left the office four years ago.
The vehicle inspection worksheet goes to the insurance carrier, because carriers subpoena everything.
The photographs go into an evidence management system, which has a different retention period from paper, because they were purchased under a different budget line.
I wrote all four down on the back of the printed schedule.
Then I wrote a fifth line, and underlined it, and the underline went through the paper.
The tow company.
Every vehicle that goes to an impound lot generates a tow slip, a storage invoice, and a lien notice. Those are business records. They are kept as long as the business feels like keeping them.
A tow company is not a government agency and has no retention schedule at all.
At six-forty I logged off and walked back to the halfway house and signed the board at 6:58, two minutes inside curfew.
Denise, who runs the desk on weeknights and does not like me, made a point of looking at the clock.
“Cutting it,” she said.
“Two minutes,” I said.
“Two minutes is cutting it.”
I went up. Eight women, one bathroom, and the shower had a sign on it that said fifteen minutes maximum, which nobody enforced and everybody obeyed.
I sat on the bed with the folder on my knees.
The room was nine feet by eleven. I had measured it in my second week with a piece of string because I wanted to know if it was bigger than the cell.
It was bigger by four square feet.
I made a list of what I now knew existed and no longer existed.
Existed and destroyed: measurements, diagrams, the vehicle worksheet, the original photographs, the downloaded electronic data.
Existed and permanent: the report itself, which is the summary of all of those.
That is the whole problem in one sentence.
The state keeps the conclusion forever and throws away the evidence for the conclusion after five years.
You can read what a trooper decided. You cannot check his arithmetic.
Unless somebody else kept a copy.
I turned the page over and looked at the fifth line again, the one I had underlined through the paper.
The tow company on the report was called Ardmore Recovery, and there was a phone number, and the number had a 3 in it that had been struck by a bad ribbon on a printer and looked like an 8.
I called both.
The first number was a nail salon.
The second number rang eleven times and a man answered and said the name of the company like a question.
I said I was calling about a vehicle towed six years ago on the ninth of March.
He said, “You got a plate?”
I gave him the plate.
He said, “Hold on.”
I heard a chair, and a drawer, and then nothing for four minutes and ten seconds.
Then he came back and said, “Yeah. We still got the file.”