Franklin County Criminal Docket Searches
Check the court named on your notice before anything else. Benton-Franklin Counties Superior Court handles felonies filed with Franklin County venue. Most county misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors run through Franklin County District Court. Misdemeanors charged inside Pasco belong to Pasco Municipal Court. Connell is a wrinkle. The current state directory sends Connell matters to District Court, though the state search still lists a Connell Municipal Court option. Confirm a confusing venue by phone using the citation. The best search keys are a case number, the exact court, the case type, the filing year, and the party name exactly as the notice spells it. A broad name search can pull up several different people, and picking the wrong court or category can hide the case entirely.
- Open Washington Courts Search Case Records and select Superior or District/Municipal.
- Choose Franklin County Superior Court, Franklin District Court, or the named municipal court.
- Select criminal, criminal traffic, criminal nontraffic, or probable cause as appropriate.
- Search by case number first, then use the name and filing year to narrow a match.
- Confirm the next setting and request the needed copy from the court that owns the record.
Odyssey and State Criminal Search
Superior criminal cases open up through another free route: the public Odyssey Portal. Smart Search there takes a case number or a party name. Type the name in Last, First Middle order. A flood of hits can be narrowed with filters. Apply them for county, location, date, status, case category, or judicial officer. That matters because Odyssey stops after the first 200 matches. A common surname alone will blow past that cap fast.
District and municipal cases travel a different road. Those go through the statewide limited-jurisdiction search. The state itself warns the data can lag by about a day. It may be incomplete as well. No search layer substitutes for the actual court file. When a Franklin County criminal docket refuses to surface online, call or visit the right clerk. You can also try a public terminal at the courthouse. Filing the court's record request form is one more route.
The official limited-jurisdiction search screen is where Franklin court and case-type filters sit on separate lines. Run the query once those are set.
Those separated filters are why the same name can return nothing until you pick the right court and the criminal category. One wrong dropdown can bury a live case.
Criminal Dockets: What They Show
Think of a docket as an event index rather than the full story of the prosecution. Franklin Superior's public case view can show case information, parties, disposition events, procedural events, hearings, and a Register of Actions. District and municipal results may list the court, the case category, the setting, and whatever outcome fields the limited-jurisdiction system carries.
| Case Number | The court-assigned identifier used to distinguish the file. |
|---|---|
| Charge | The filed offense category and related event information, subject to later amendment. |
| Events | Filings, motions, orders, and other entries recorded by the clerk. |
| Hearings | Dates, hearing types, courtrooms, and judicial officers when publicly shown. |
| Disposition | The recorded outcome event. It must be read with later entries and official orders. |
An event you can see does not guarantee its document image is public. Ask the Franklin County Clerk, District Court, or Pasco Municipal Court for the filed papers and any certification.
Franklin Criminal Calendar Categories
The Franklin County Court Docket hub splits criminal, criminal motion, and preliminary appearance lists. Separate calendars cover domestic, juvenile, protection-order, probate, and trial-readiness matters. A legacy docket page still exists for when a current QR-linked file fails to load. The split matters more than it looks. A preliminary appearance is not a trial date. A criminal motion may sit on a different PDF from the main criminal calendar. A name missing from one list proves nothing about how the case ended. It may have moved. It may have landed on another calendar, or run into access limits.
Day-of check: Treat a posted calendar as the latest published schedule, then confirm with the originating court because proceedings can be rescheduled.
Criminal Case Stages on the Docket
Each entry marks one procedural step. Early public events may name the filed charge. An initial appearance may show up there too. An arraignment is where a plea gets addressed. Pretrial entries can cover motions, discovery-related events, status conferences, and later settings. A plea or trial generates further docket events. Then a disposition and sentencing follow where applicable.
Docket flow: Filing › Arraignment › Pretrial › Plea or Trial › Disposition › Sentencing
The order is rarely tidy. A hearing gets continued, a charge changes, or a new order adds an event. Read the whole chronological Register of Actions. Read the signed orders from the clerk too. A charge label alone tells you nothing about the result.
Franklin Clerk and District Requests
The Franklin County Clerk keeps Superior criminal records. The office sits at 1016 N 4th Avenue, Suite B306, Pasco, reachable at 509-545-3525. Its online records request wants the case name, case number, and document title. It also wants the filing or order date, delivery method, and requester details. Allow seven days. Certified copies go out by mail. Noncertified copies may be emailed or mailed. District Court sits in Building B218 at the same street address and answers 509-545-3593. Its request form covers dockets, complaints or citations, guilty pleas, and judgments and sentences. It also covers audio and certified or plain copies. Staff calculates the charge. Requests then go by the methods on the form. Sharing an address does not make the two offices interchangeable.
Franklin County Criminal Docket Courts
Court level drives both the docket search and the copy request. Superior Court hears felonies. It posts its public case activity in Odyssey and the statewide Superior search. Franklin District Court takes county limited-jurisdiction criminal matters. Pasco Municipal Court handles city misdemeanor cases. Juvenile Court is a separate division with its own record-access limits.
| Court | Criminal docket scope | First search path |
|---|---|---|
| Superior Court | Felony criminal matters and lower-court appeals | Odyssey or statewide Superior search |
| District Court | County misdemeanors, gross misdemeanors, and related limited matters | Washington District/Municipal search |
| Pasco Municipal | Pasco city misdemeanors and criminal traffic | State search, then municipal clerk |
| Juvenile Court | Juvenile offender proceedings | Contact the custodian about lawful access |
Franklin Criminal Docket Filing Context
One county budget allocation table lists 595 criminal filings in Franklin Superior. It lists 1,535 civil filings alongside them, for a combined 2,130. Those figures come from AOC 2022 data. They reflect that allocation basis, not any live 2026 docket count. A different state report, from 2025, counted 95 Franklin felony convictions that drew a sentence to a state institution. Be careful with that number. It covers only one sentencing subset. It is not the full set of charges, filings, or convictions in Franklin County.
Report labels carry real weight here. A single case file and a caseload report count different things, so run a docket search when you need one Franklin County criminal docket, and cite the report figure only for the group of cases it actually covers.
Access Rules for Criminal Dockets
Washington court records are broadly open to the public. Still, an open index can sit beside a sealed file or a restricted document. So what you see is not always all there is. Juvenile records, protected personal identifiers, and anything under a sealing order call for separate handling. Search results are a lookup aid. They are not permission to override the custodian's decision or to drag out identifiers the case does not need you to know. Treat the docket as a map of filings. Let the clerk decide what the public may actually hold.
Washington access rules:
General Rule 31 defines court records and governs public access.
General Rule 22 protects specified personal information and restricted record categories.
RCW 13.50.260 addresses juvenile sealing and the effect of a sealing order.
The county's ordinary Public Records Act portal has a catch: it expressly excludes court files. So a criminal docket request belongs with the originating court, never with GovQA. If part of a file cannot be released, ask for the nonrestricted portion and let the clerk sort the rest.
Franklin Therapeutic Court Dockets
Franklin Therapeutic Court works with eligible participants whose substance-use or mental-health needs fit the program. It runs a veterans track too. Misdemeanor, gross-misdemeanor, and felony cases can all land there. The docket fills with treatment, case management, community service, phases, and frequent court appearances. Those events look nothing like a standard one-hearing path.
A referral packet is not a public case-search form, so it will not find anyone. Whether someone participates rests with the court and the facts of that individual case. The same goes for whether a charge gets amended or dismissed. Track the real criminal docket and confirm access through the proper clerk. Note: a program description alone never establishes anything about a named case. It cannot show that a case was accepted, completed, amended, or dismissed.