For four months, Utah’s gun background check database lacked a chunk of criminal records pertaining to mental incompetence because of a database glitch in the state court system. And for about 13 months, due to a lapse by another state agency, the federal firearm background check system was missing the same information.
Between November and March, the state’s gun background check system did not receive records from the Utah court system that would prevent someone who had either been found mentally incompetent or had been committed to a mental health treatment facility from purchasing a firearm.
And for more than a year, those same type of records weren’t forwarded to the federal level by the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI), which oversees the state’s background check system.
After the problem was caught in March, the state courts system sent the missing records to BCI.
In fact, to cover all of their bases, all mental competency and commitment case files from February 2017 to March 2018 — some 1,500 records — were bundled up and sent to BCI on March 23, according to state courts spokesman Geoffrey Fattah.
Annually, the court database sends an average of 900 records related to mental competency and commitment to BCI. Fattah didn’t know how many records were missing during the four months.
Those specific cases “would be extremely difficult to tease out” from the bundle, he said.
“We’re fairly confident that all of the information has been restored and that the problem has been fixed,” Fattah said recently.
The state courts system is supposed to send civil as well as criminal records — including felony and domestic violence convictions — to BCI every night.
But on Nov. 17, the state courts underwent a system upgrade and stopped forwarding some relevant records, according to Fattah. Until the glitch was caught in early March, mental competency and commitment information wasn’t sent to BCI.
The time-period gap is narrower than previously reported by the Ogden Standard-Examiner, based on inaccurate information from the state courts.
But for four months, no one noticed.
The error was discovered by the courts’ information technology department, while gathering data requested by the Standard-Examiner for a story about the state’s gun background check system.
While fixing the database glitch, programmers wrote additional code so that if information stops sending to BCI in the future, they receive an alert, according to Fattah.
When that flaw was discovered in March, a second lapse was found: In February 2017, BCI migrated from one database to another and during the transfer, mental competency data stopped being sent from BCI to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) — information that is used to determine if prospective firearms or explosives buyers are eligible to make those purchases.
((For about 13 months, mental competency data — which makes up a relatively small portion of all records — was not forwarded to the national database.))
The state’s records in NICS help in preventing someone from purchasing a firearm in another state if he or she has already been denied in Utah.
BCI can’t retroactively review who was approved to purchase a firearm between November and March because the system doesn’t have that information anymore. State law allows BCI to hold onto data related to who has been approved to buy a firearm for 20 days. On day 21, that report is purged.
The records affected by the court system glitch account for a relatively small percentage of the total records the court system sends to BCI.
On average, the court database sends 900 records related to mental competency and commitment to BCI each year. In comparison, the court system annually deals with tens of thousands of felony cases, Fattah said.
In fiscal year 2017 (July 2016-July 2017), some 21,496 people were convicted of state felonies, Fattah said. Those convictions come with an automatic firearm restriction.
Lance Tyler, who supervises BCI’s Brady Bill division, said mental competency and commitment cases account for a small percentage of denials.
In 2017, 1.5 percent of people who tried to buy a gun in Utah from federally licensed dealers failed the background check. Of the 1,584 denials, 76 were related to mental competency and commitment.
Tyler thinks it is unlikely that someone mentally incompetent was approved by the background check system during the November-March time period. Some of the files BCI receives are redundant, he said. And, there’s a chance a criminal defendant with competency issues may have prior felony convictions that already landed them in the database, Fattah said.
In regards to criminal cases, he said: “The vast majority of people who have mental competency issues are in custody, awaiting evaluation or awaiting a bed in the state hospital.”
Civil commitments are trickier, he said. But individuals who face civil commitment are most likely hospitalized, he added.
That he knows of, “we have not had any incidents of someone gaining a firearm that shouldn’t have based on missing data,” Fattah said.
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