Search Guide

Indiana v. Richard M. Allen — Court File Search
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What This Is

This tool lets you search across the publicly available court filings from Indiana v. Richard M. Allen using natural language queries. Instead of opening documents one at a time, you can ask a question and the system finds the most relevant passages across every indexed filing.

18,435
Indexed chunks
667
Court filings
Oct '22 – Dec '25
Date range

The indexed documents include motions, orders, transcripts, hearing records, exhibits, and other filings from the public docket. Documents that are sealed, redacted, or image-only (scanned without OCR) are not included in the search results.

How It Works

This is a semantic search engine, not a keyword search. It understands meaning, not just exact words. When you type a query, the system converts it into a mathematical representation and compares it against every document chunk in the database, returning the closest matches by meaning.

This means you can search for concepts, not just terms. A query like "defense arguments about the bullet" will find relevant passages even if those passages don't contain the exact word "bullet" — they might say "round," "cartridge," "projectile," or "firearms evidence."

Each result shows the source filing, date, a relevance score, and a link to the original document on Google Drive.

Search Tips

Natural language works best. Ask questions or describe what you're looking for in plain English.

Good queries
What did the defense argue about the unspent bullet?
Finds testimony, closing arguments, and motions related to the bullet evidence.
Good queries
confessions at Westville Correctional
Surfaces references to Allen's statements while incarcerated.
Good queries
motion to disqualify Judge Gull
Finds the defense filings and court orders related to recusal arguments.
Less effective
McLeland 2023
Too sparse. Try instead: "McLeland motion to seal" or "prosecution arguments about public access."

General guidance:

What's Indexed

The search covers text extracted from 667 PDF filings downloaded from the public Google Drive case file archive. This includes:

Approximately 300 files in the collection are image-only PDFs (scanned documents, photographs, handwritten letters) that couldn't be text-extracted. These are still available through the case file archive but won't appear in search results.

Limitations

About

This tool was built as a proof of concept for document intelligence applied to public court records. The underlying technology — semantic vector search over extracted document text — is designed to be adaptable to any large collection of court filings.

All documents are sourced from publicly available court records. This project is not affiliated with the court, any party to the case, or any legal organization.