Have you talked to a lawyer?

No, I haven't. What is considered public record? Do I need a court order for any of this? Do I need a reason other than my own piece of mind over the incident?

It's over seven years, so it will have rolled into archives at the PD.

Was there a prosecution? If so, you will find all the info you are looking for in the court files. Being over seven years, it also will have rolled into archives, but court clerks are going to be much more helpful than the cops.

Cops are utterly worthless as a source of information, so you will likely be wasting your time dealing with them. They know that there is no penalty for them lying to anybody about anything at any time (cops routinely commit perjury), so even if they do give you some information, it is not going to be reliable.

If this made the news, you will not have to wait for an archive search by hitting the newpaper files at the library.

If it's a good library, the research librarians will be able to find the papers for you. If you are really lucky, there will be a keyword-in-context index for the paper. Failing that, if it made much of a splash, NEXUS/LEXUS may turn it up.

If you can find the reporter(s) who covered the story, you may get some action there, likewise the newspaper's morgue/library may have some stuff as well.

1) Pose an appropriate question. By appropriate, I mean one that is very specific about the information you are looking for.
2) Ask a likely source.
3) Repeat as necessary.

Lawyers typically know nothing about research or investigation unless it involves legal papers. They also will tell you you need a lawyer when a trip to the library will fit the bill.

Missing on preview: If the case is unsolved, it is still open. Open investigations are not public records, but court records usually are (unless sealed by a court order.)

It's an old trick to cover something up by opening a law enforcement investigation (thereby making it exempt from disclosure) and then not doing an investigation.

Based on the vagueness of your question and the lack of specificity in your description of the situation, it's hard to give you much more than equally vague advice.

Ok, someone claimed to have committed a crime in 1995. He was arrested, placed in jail, but subsequently released. A lot of the story I've been told makes no sense and I want to know what really happened. It's not an open investigation.

Specifics I want to know:

The actual charges brought against him
Whether the sentence he was facing is the what he told me was facing.
Whether the time spent in jail awaiting trial was true.
Whether the charges were dropped and no sentence meted since the respondents never showed up and the judge dropped it because he was 'a good guy' according to character witnesses.

I have names and dates.

Court Minutes should answer most of your questions. Seven years is not long ago at all, if the minutes from seven years ago are not still in the clerk of court's office, there is usually some intermediate place that serves the records until they are archived. In the county I live in it is someone called the Administrative Officer of the Court. I'd start with the clerk. Court minutes are usually in chronological order, so dates are helpful. Have fun.

I don't know about police records, those tend to be municipal records, and at least where I live that seems to be handled by each town or city.

Police have different policies about what they will release. In some states they are not actually considered public records. Back in Illinois, I was trying to find out about a former friend's arrest on fraud charges, right after it happened, and got nowhere with three police departments. The only thing in the paper was a sentence or two months later when he pled guilty.

In Wisconsin, court records are completely public, and you can even look them up online -- many states have the same sort of thing now. 1996 might not have been put on the computers, though.

If it's important to you, you can ask a detective agency to do a criminal background check for as little as $25-50. They'll probably be able to get stuff you wouldn't be able to as a private citizen (possibly illicitly, too, if that bothers you).

Go to the court clerk's office and ask for a criminal records search on your friend. Have their birthdate handy, so you can be relatively sure it's the person you're looking for and not somebody else with the same name (seriously this does happen.)

Do not spend a dime on professional services until you have done the courts and the library for news reports. Even then, these so-call "background" and "criminal" searches available on the web are mostly useless and worthless (as well as overpriced.)

Check your state's public records laws. Don't waste time on cops (see above.) If police records aren't public, that's the end of the trail. Even if they are, the police are the least likely to provide information. You'd do better asking Elvis or Bigfoot.

If there wasn't a charge, there won't be any trial records. QED.

Go see the court clert. If you come up empty, get back to us and we'll see what's what.

If you want to consult, contact info is in the profile. I've been doing investigative stuff for over a decade and pulling criminal records is pretty routine.

But go hit the court records before flailing around here anymore. Or not, I'm sure if you ask enough people you'll get every sort of advice under the sun and most of it will be useless or wrong.