Kentucky lawmakers say the state's victims notification platform is not up to snuff.

Since 2021, the automated service Vine has had troubles that leave victims in the dark.

According to a recent investigation by the News Kentucky editions, June Lefler has more in tonight's legislative update.

Vine stands for Victim Information and Notification every day.

It lets crime victims know if their alleged perpetrator is behind bars, in court or out in the community.

It's a product of Equifax, which acquired app.

We help victims and their families become safer and more informed through timely offender release, court case and protective order notifications.

Vine was founded in 1994 in response to the murder of a young Louisville woman, Mary Byron.

After being incarcerated for raping, assaulting and stalking Mary, her assailant was released, but she was never informed.

Despite requests from her family to be notified upon his release on Mary's 21st birthday, her assailant approached her with a gun, fired shots at close range and killed her instantly.

Automation plays a crucial role in Vine's effectiveness, especially against human error, like in Mary's case.

But the state court system has not handed over essential information for the tool to work, citing privacy concerns for victims and now financial costs to the courts.

We began to have concerns about the potential monetization and protection of our court data.

Despite these concerns, we worked with Apparus to add language to our data share agreement to require them after performing a search to delete court record data.

However, we later learned this wasn't happening and at that point that's when in 2021, the court data, which I'm sharing the court data with Apparus, they now they now want us to finance the costs of the notification platform to the tune of 500,000 for a one time implementation fee and 300 and 360,000 for service fee for the first 12 months with annual services increasing after that.

That proposed cost far exceeds any cost we currently undertake for comparable services.

The head of the Administrative Office of the Courts says the new state case management system will provide that automated information.

But that is not a quick enough fix for a Jefferson County Republican lawmaker.

This is extremely frustrating that we're now three years in and the court is not providing this information that would be rather simple to provide.

And it's not very costly.

I mean, we said a couple hundred thousand dollars.

There was no request.

It'd be easy to to make that to make that budget request meet that budget request.

It wasn't made.

And I know you say, oh, it's only a couple hundred thousand, but for our branch that that is a lot.

We don't have a lot of extras you guys will start hearing me talk about.

We are in the process of an RFP for a new CMS.

There's additional costs that are coming and this isn't just a one time fee.

So what I would suggest is that we bring the court system in here every two months to give us an update until this is resolved.

There's going to be a situation that something happens very badly.

And I want to be very clear that it's not acceptable.

It hasn't been acceptable for a long time and it needs to be resolved.

W DRP in Louisville highlighted Fine's flaws last month.

Their investigation found the platform has experienced local outages, sometimes lasting up to three weeks.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm June Leffler.

Thank you, June.

The administrative office of the court says prosecutors often keep victims up to date.

Can offer as much or as little detail to best suit the victim's needs.

State Representative Jason Name says that approach, though, leaves cracks in the system.