Delaware Court Records: CourtConnect Is Civil-Only, and What That Means for a Criminal Search

Delaware's public court records search, CourtConnect, covers civil cases only. There is no public online criminal docket search on the Delaware Judiciary's own site, which is an absence worth stating plainly rather than glossing over, since most readers assume a state's main portal covers criminal cases too.

On the record-relief side, Delaware is in the middle of a large, genuinely newsworthy rollout: its first automated Clean Slate expungement sweep only ran in mid-2026, and the backlog it is working through is still in the millions.

Information last verified on 2026-08-10. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

This guide is part of a broader look at court records by state. For the general mechanics of federal versus state versus county searches, see how to look up court records and are court records public.

CourtConnect: A Civil-Only Search

Delaware's own description of CourtConnect is direct about its scope: the Superior Court, Court of Common Pleas, and Justice of the Peace Court now offer the ability to access civil case information online 24 hours a day through CourtConnect. Search options include name, business name, case type, judgment search, and case activities. That description does not include criminal cases, and that is not an oversight, it reflects how the tool is actually built.

The practical result: if you are looking for a criminal case in Delaware, CourtConnect will not have it. Delaware does not run a public, self-service online criminal docket search on its judiciary site. Criminal history instead runs through the State Bureau of Identification and the Delaware Criminal Justice Information System, which provide certified background-check products rather than a free public lookup. Anyone who needs criminal history information in Delaware should expect to go through that certified process, not a court website search.

That routing is statutory, not merely administrative. Access to Delaware criminal history record information is governed by 11 Del. C. § 8513, which directs the State Bureau of Identification to furnish records only to defined categories of requester. Under § 8513(a), those categories include criminal justice agencies and courts acting for the administration of criminal justice, and any person or that person’s attorney of record who requests a copy of the person’s own Delaware criminal history record, provided the person submits to an identity procedure set by the Superintendent of the State Police and pays a fee set by the Superintendent. Section 8513(b) adds further authorized categories, including individuals and public bodies acting for a purpose authorized by Delaware statute, executive order, or court rule, decision, or order, and requests tied to international travel or a national security clearance. The section also states that dissemination of criminal history record information by any person or agency other than the Bureau or its designee is prohibited.

That statute is the reason there is no open criminal docket search to point you to. Delaware treats criminal history as a controlled-dissemination system by law, released by one agency to enumerated requesters, while CourtConnect is a court administrative tool whose scope is civil dockets.

Family Court records are also handled separately from CourtConnect, through their own access process rather than the civil case-information tool.

CourtConnect's own disclaimer is worth reading before relying on any result: the Civil Docket Report obtained through this Internet service is not for official use, and the Delaware Judiciary does not guarantee or warrant the correctness, completeness, timeliness, or utility of the Civil Docket Report. The data behind it is sourced from documents actually filed with the Judiciary's office or a judge, orders entered from the bench, scheduling orders, and judgments or liens entered by operation of law.

Certified Copies

This guide does not publish a specific Delaware certified-copy fee figure, since one was not confirmed from a primary source in this session. Contact the Prothonotary (the Superior Court clerk) or the relevant court's clerk to confirm current pricing for the specific case.

Sealing Your Record: Delaware Calls It Expungement

Delaware's statutory term is expungement, not sealing. The state's automatic mechanism runs under 11 Del. C. § 4373A for adults and 10 Del. C. § 1017A for juveniles, both of which are headed “Mandatory expungement; automatic.” Its companion section, § 4373, is headed “Mandatory expungement; application through SBI” and sets the underlying eligibility rules plus the route for people who apply rather than wait for the sweep. Section 4373A(b) states that beginning August 1, 2024, on a monthly basis, the State Bureau of Identification shall identify cases that are eligible for mandatory expungement and proceed under § 4372(e)(2) of this title to expunge the eligible records.

Underlying eligibility, from § 4373(a), varies by category, and the waiting periods matter. A case terminated in favor of the accused carries no waiting period, and neither does a conviction for possession of marijuana under 16 Del. C. § 4764 or possession of drug paraphernalia under 16 Del. C. § 4771. A violation-level conviction is different: § 4373(a)(1)b makes it eligible only once 3 years have passed since the date of conviction, so a violation is not clearable the moment the case ends. Misdemeanor convictions become eligible once 5 years have passed since the date of conviction, and the specific felonies listed in § 4373(a)(3), mostly drug and forgery offenses, become eligible once 10 years have passed since the conviction or the date of release from incarceration, whichever is later.

The state's own June 2026 announcement gives a real sense of scale: Delaware's first true automated batch of Clean Slate cases cleared more than 64,000 eligible cases from public-facing criminal background checks, more than three times the volume the state processed manually in all of 2025. The state also disclosed the scope of what remains: a backlog of more than one million cases, with a stated goal of clearing the bulk of that backlog by August. In short, Delaware's automatic expungement law is real and running, but as of mid-2026 it had only begun working through a very large backlog, a genuinely different picture from a state that has already caught up.

For the full eligibility rules and process, including the petition-based route for cases outside the automatic track, see Delaware expungement laws, which this guide does not duplicate.

Using Delaware Court Records the Right Way

CourtConnect is built for checking a specific civil case, whether it is your own or one you have a legitimate reason to look into, not for compiling a background file on someone else, and it is not a criminal-history tool at all. If a Delaware record is used to screen a job applicant or a tenant, that use is governed separately by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act. Under 15 U.S.C. § 1681c, a criminal conviction is exempt from the standard seven-year reporting window that applies to most arrests and civil judgments, meaning it can be reported indefinitely unless it has been expunged under Delaware law.

Related Resources

Court Records by State covers the full 50-state picture. See also How to Look Up Court Records, Are Court Records Public?, Delaware Expungement Laws, Delaware Background Check Laws, Delaware Warrant Search, and Delaware Public Records Laws.

Disclaimer

This article provides general information about Delaware's CourtConnect system, the absence of a public criminal case search, and Delaware's Clean Slate expungement rollout as of mid-2026. It is not legal advice. Program status and portal features change; verify current details with the Delaware Judiciary or a licensed Delaware attorney before relying on anything here for a specific situation.

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Last updated: 2026-08-10. Portal facts and fees reflect their published status as of August 2026.