Find Lowndes County Court Records

How to Search Lowndes County Court Records

Lowndes County court records are searched one court at a time. The county runs no combined portal that returns Circuit, Chancery, Justice, and Municipal files from a single box. The Circuit Clerk keeps the law-court files. The Chancery Clerk keeps the equity, land, and probate files. The lower courts hold their own citation and misdemeanor records. The first move is always to name the right court, then pick the channel that office uses. The Circuit Clerk's online case search runs on Delta Computer Systems at the Delta Circuit Clerk portal.

Gather a few details before you start. A full name, a case number, or a filing date will narrow most searches. Online access is a starting point, not the certified copy. If the online index differs from the courthouse file, the courthouse file is the one that counts.

1. Identify the court. Circuit Court handles felonies and civil claims over $200,000. County Court handles civil claims from $3,500 to $200,000 plus appeals from the lower courts. Chancery Court handles divorce, custody, estates, and land. Justice Court and Columbus Municipal Court handle small claims, citations, and city misdemeanors.
2. For Circuit, County, judgment, or marriage records, use the Delta Circuit Clerk portal. It is subscription based and divided into Civil Court, Criminal Court, Judgment Roll, and Marriage License.
3. For chancery, probate, land, and board records, use the Chancery Clerk channels. Land records run on DuProcess, and older chancery cases sit in a separate Delta chancery case search.
4. For e-filed cases, check Mississippi Electronic Courts through public access. Lowndes County Circuit Court and County Court went live in that system on July 24, 2023.
5. For tickets, city misdemeanors, and bench-warrant matters, contact Justice Court or Columbus Municipal Court directly. Those files do not appear in the Delta Circuit Clerk portal.

The Delta Computer Systems Circuit Clerk portal shows the four record groups a subscriber can open.

Civil and criminal cases reach back to 1993, while the scanned record images begin in the years that follow.

Circuit Clerk Search Fields on the Delta Portal

The Delta Circuit Clerk page is not a free open search. Access requires a subscription that costs $30 a month or $360 a year, including a $5 monthly Delta processing fee. After logging in, a subscriber chooses one of four record groups and searches within it. Each group covers a set date range, and the marriage index has no document images. The table below lists the fields and controls the portal exposes.

Official copies are not produced by the website. The portal states plainly that certified copies come from the courthouse, and that online data is not official if it differs from the courthouse record. Scheduled hearing dates show up on the court dockets the clerks maintain, not on the index alone.

Chancery and Land Records Channels

Chancery records sit with the Chancery Clerk. Divorce, custody, estates, guardianship, land title, and board minutes route here, not to the Circuit Clerk. The county Chancery Clerk page links to an online land-records index covering February 2002 to present. That index is informational, and the page warns that only the Land Records Index at the courthouse is official.

The Lowndes County Chancery Clerk online records site opens the county's land-records index to the public.

The site updates each weekday and advises searchers to try every spelling variation of a name.

For deeper land searches, the clerk runs the DuProcess Official Records Inquiry. It searches by grantor and grantee name, instrument number, book and page, legal description, parcel ID, and street address. Chancery case files, including older divorce and estate matters, also appear in a separate Delta chancery case search that runs on the same $30 monthly or $360 annual subscription. That case portal lets a user search by party name in last-name-first form, case number, filed date, final disposition date, docket book and page, or file number.

The Delta chancery case portal covers Chancery Court cases and land records but not Circuit Court files.

Because chancery case coverage there is not stated as current, call or visit the Chancery Clerk for recent files and certified copies.

Types of Lowndes County Court Records

Court records in Lowndes County fall into groups that track the court that produced them. Circuit Court generates felony case files and large civil suits. County Court generates mid-size civil files and appeals from the lower courts. Chancery Court generates divorce, custody, estate, guardianship, and land files. Justice Court and Columbus Municipal Court generate small-claims, citation, and city-misdemeanor files.

The categories most people look for break down like this:

• Civil case files: complaints, answers, motions, orders, and judgments.
• Criminal case files: affidavits, indictments, pleas, bonds, and sentencing orders.
• Family and domestic files: divorce, custody, support, and protective-order matters in Chancery Court.
• Probate and estate files: testate and intestate estates, guardianships, conservatorships, and will contests.
• Judgments and liens: the Circuit Clerk judgment roll plus tax liens and UCCs recorded by the Chancery Clerk.
• Marriage licenses: issued and indexed by the Circuit Clerk.

Historic probate matters also sit in the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library local-history indexes for 1830 to 1964, with original case files held in the Billups-Garth Archives.

Note: Youth Court delinquency files are confidential under Mississippi law and are not part of the public court record search.

What Lowndes County Court Records Show

A typical court record carries a standard set of fields, even though each online system arranges them differently. The Delta Circuit Clerk groups records into Civil, Criminal, Judgment Roll, and Marriage License. The Delta chancery search routes by party, case number, and dates. Across all of these, the core data points are the same. The table below outlines what a case record commonly returns.

The DuProcess Official Records Inquiry shows how detailed a single recorded instrument can be.

Each land record lists the instrument number, parties, book and page, parcel data, legal description, and a viewable image of the document.

A few status terms appear again and again in case dockets. Reading them correctly tells you where a case stands.

Disposed

The court has entered a final judgment, plea, dismissal, or sentence.

Pending

The case is active and not yet closed.

Continued

A hearing or trial was moved to a later date.

Judgment roll

The Circuit Clerk's record of civil money judgments.

Capias

A bench warrant a court issues, often for a failure to appear.

Statewide Access to Lowndes County Court Records

Mississippi runs a statewide e-filing and public-access system called Mississippi Electronic Courts, or MEC. Lowndes County Circuit Court and County Court joined that system on July 24, 2023, so newer e-filed cases can appear there. The platform is the state's official channel for participating courts.

The Mississippi Electronic Courts system is the state's official e-filing and public-access platform.

It carries court records for participating courts statewide, separate from the county's Delta and DuProcess portals.

Public remote viewing runs through Public Access to Mississippi Electronic Courts, known as PAMEC. Registration is open to attorneys and the public. The annual registration fee is $10, with a charge of $0.20 for each page a search returns. Records can also be viewed for free at the clerk's office during business hours, subject to copy fees.

The PAMEC online registration page sets up the account a member of the public needs for remote viewing.

After registering, a user can search participating courts and pay the per-page fee only for the pages actually returned.

Public Access Framework for Lowndes County Court Records

Mississippi treats government records as open unless a law exempts them. The Mississippi Public Records Act, Miss. Code Ann. Section 25-61-1, sets that baseline and is explained on the Mississippi Public Records Act page. The Mississippi Ethics Commission handles public-records complaints and describes the right of access on its public records page.

The first rule in practice is to ask the office that holds the record. Circuit, County, criminal, judgment, and marriage records route to the Circuit Clerk. Chancery, divorce, probate, and land records route to the Chancery Clerk. Court access can run online, in person, by mail, or through a formal public-records request. Online indexes still are not the certified record, and court confidentiality rules can limit what a member of the public sees.

Records That Are Sealed or Confidential in Lowndes County

Some Lowndes County court files are closed to the public. Youth Court records are confidential under Miss. Code Ann. Section 43-21-251. They cover children in need of supervision, delinquent children, and abused or neglected children. Adoption files in Chancery Court are restricted, and commitment cases involving mental health carry medical privacy. Public systems may also redact Social Security numbers, birth dates, driver license numbers, and bank-account numbers.

A record can also be sealed by court order or removed by expunction. Miss. Code Ann. Section 99-19-71 governs expunction of eligible Mississippi charges and convictions, subject to waiting periods and exclusions for serious offenses. A person seeking expunction files in the court where the case occurred. That may be Circuit Court for felonies, County or Justice Court for qualifying misdemeanors, or Municipal Court for city charges. The clerk can supply the case number and disposition needed to begin.

Requesting Lowndes County Court Records in Person

When a record is not online, or a certified copy is needed, several channels reach the same files. The Circuit Clerk sits in Room 260 of the Lowndes County Courthouse at 505 2nd Avenue, Columbus, open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Phone lines are split by division. Civil matters reach 662-329-5908 or 662-329-3394, and criminal matters reach 662-241-1920 or 662-329-3335. The Chancery Clerk answers at 662-329-5800.

Mail requests reach the Circuit Clerk at P.O. Box 31, Columbus, MS 39703, and the Chancery Clerk at P.O. Box 684, Columbus, MS 39703. Justice Court records come from its office at 309 S. MLK Jr. Drive, phone 662-329-5929, while city traffic and misdemeanor matters route to Columbus Municipal Court, with a payment line at 662-370-2399. A formal request can also be filed through the county's Public Record Request page. More detail on copy fees and request methods sits with the Circuit Clerk office.