Finding and placing the right tenant for your rental can be difficult... here are a couple of tips that might help:

1) Join your local rental property association, and find their search engine for reference on a tenant prospect.  The RPOA (rental property owners association) that I belong to has a website that you can search for past evictions and/or money damages.

2) Check into the local district court websites for past records for that person.  If they (the prospect) have several landlord/tenant cases, it would mean that they know the court system very well, and you will probably get added to the list.

I personally don't enjoy going in front of a judge, and this simple search has reduced the amount of evictions I've had to perform.  By the way it costs me way more getting a tenant out through eviction than holding out for a better prospect up front.