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George Orwell Has Moved to Cleveland. (Or Is It Common Sense?)
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”
– George Orwell (1984)
On July 10th The Cleveland Plain Dealer and it’s online presence, cleveland.com, announced a new policy: The right to be forgotten. Writes President and Editor of Advance Ohio, Chris Quinn:
Not a week goes by anymore, it seems, that several of us in the newsroom don’t hear from people who are blocked from improving their lives by the prominence of cleveland.com stories about their mistakes in Google searches of their names. They don’t get jobs, or their children find the content, or new friends see it and make judgments.
I started asking the question in columns a few years ago: How long should someone have to pay for a mistake?
…People who have committed non-violent crimes who successfully petition the courts to permanently delete all records of their criminal cases will be able to send us a request, along with proof of the expungement, and in most cases, we will remove their names from the stories about them on cleveland.com. Google of their names will stop finding those stories.
Furthermore, they promise to stop using mugshots. Mugshots, you see, reinforce racial stereotypes. “Because many crimes we cover are borne of poverty, which disproportionately involves African Americans, the mug shots are disproportionately of African Americans.” There’s a lot to unravel in that sentence, not the least of which is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
But to what extent is it a newspaper’s responsibility to hide or alter truths? Doesn’t The New York Times constantly remind us that “The Truth is Hard,” and the Washington Post tells things “die in the darkness?” On the other hand, is this just really common sense?
Earlier this month I questioned the coverage that The Capital Gazette gave of the person that eventually entered their newsroom with a shotgun and murdered five of the paper’s employees. How much attention should local papers even give to the police blotter? The glare of the spotlight does strange things to people that are not prepared to deal with it.
For The Plain Dealer these are the new rules:
“We will greatly curtail our use of mug shots, restricting them to the most notorious of crimes. Generally, if we believe news value exists in a photo of an accused criminal, we will go to the court appearance and shoot our own photo.
We will stop naming most people accused of most minor crimes.
And we will consider requests for removal of names from dated stories about minor crimes from people who have had their records expunged. This is an experiment for us. We don’t know what to expect or how it might affect our resources. We might have to adjust the process based on experience.”
Should online media do this pro-actively? Or is this something that the courts should coordinate with the search engine companies? Who really has the right to rewrite and expunge history?
Published in Journalism
One would like to think that the state-of-the-art for archival technology has progressed to the point where the cost of hard copy digitization would now be low enough for public and/or college libraries to do their own archivism. Microfilm/microfiche seems like ancient tech at this point.
Google had a project to digitized newspaper hardcopies, but they discontinued the project in 2011, and I don’t see the Cleveland Plain Dealer on the list. The stuff they did archive is still online though: https://news.google.com/newspapers
If they are only eliminating the records of those whose records have been expunged, I agree with the decision. Records of convictions are expunged only in limited cases and after a finding that the accused has been rehabilitated. If the conviction is findable on Google, then the expungement is ineffective as a practical matter.
Which supplier is that? (I have a subscription to newspapers.com, which I would guess archives more than 40 current newspapers, but I don’t really know.)
The company is called Pro Quest and I got the 40 number from an article in the Columbia Journalism Review.
There are many companies that supply digital versions of already microfilmed works, it’s picking up the slack of the last 10 to 20 years that’s the problem. At one point there were 28 people working in the morgue of The New York Times. Now there’s one.
Very thought-provoking, especially as someone who airs more on the side being beware of the dangers of the online mob.
Rehabilitation is a dirty word, as far as I’m concerned. Mainly because the evidence that it’s real is pretty thin. As in anecdotes, not data. Combine that with the reality that “expunged” is basically permission to lie about one’s past, and I’m not down with that at all. Not even for minors.
It should be ineffective.
Hmm… Tricky.
How far does one go when following this logic? In the case of an expunged record, should all coverage of the case be wiped from the Internet? The investigation? The arrest? The trial?
If you wiped all record of the conviction from the web but don’t wipe all the other bits of information surrounding the case then the individual’s name could still pop up as a “person of interest” or “a suspect” in the case. But then, if you do wipe all record of the entire incident that’s potentially a lot of history going into the Memory Hole. What if there are victims involved who feel they deserve to have the incident recorded for history?
Again, as far as I’m concerned it’s the prerogative of the newspaper, but if the argument is now about ensuring the integrity of the expungement in an absolute sense, that means that all third-party archives of the information would also have to be wiped. I would not be comfortable telling archive.org that they would be required to wipe the information from their archive.
Newspapers.com claims that they archive over 8,500 newspapers dating back to the 1700s.
But that’s not the question. How much has been archived non-digitally since the beginning of this century? And who did it on microfilm before? Was is the newspapers or third parties?
As someone once said, “Digital is forever. Or five years. Whichever comes first.”
You can also get one if the arrest was improper in the first place. Hypothetical: you’re arrested without probable cause, the case is dismissed on that basis, without prejudice (meaning they can refile the charges with new evidence), and it is therefore left pending. That will show up as you currently being under indictment, even after the statute of limitations has run.
Anything that could lead to a wrong conclusion must be made an unfact.
Ok, if you have the right to have past misdeeds forgotten, then how will back ground and credit checks work?
I can imagine that you have the right to have facebook posts and google stuff purged (that you created) but public records, like mug shots, arrests or bankruptcies?
How about sex offender databases? is a lifetime membership in the club no longer permanent?
How about Supreme Court nominees. Do they have the right to have past deeds and misdeeds forgotten? If so, does this right depend on which party they belong to?
Hehe . . . they initially say “A British citizen” or “A French citizen”, leaving out words like “Naturalized” and “from a Middle Eastern country”. So far, the truth has gotten out . . .
Oh my goodness that’s a great line.
Ms. Tabby, I think you have analyzed the situation perfectly.
It shouldn’t always be permanent. Many young men’s lives are ruined by being caught in sexual follies that, if they deserve punishment, do not deserve the lifelong punishment of being branded a sexual offender for life.
The reason to label someone a sex offender for life, to be permanently quarantined from his sexual prey, is because he’s an ongoing danger to them. Many who land on the sex-offender registry in youth aren’t that kind of hardened pervert.
If it was sufficiently serious to merit public punishment, it was sufficiently serious to merit permanent public memory thereof. I will agree that there are such offenses that probably shouldn’t require registration. On the flip side, like for any other crime, deterrence is best established with serious punishment. Preferably quick and certain punishment, but there are some things our system of justice just can’t seem to manage.
This is just one of the problems with redefining “sexual harassment” to mean “anything that makes anyone feel uncomfortable, ever, even in retrospect.”
They will likely keep working, no matter what people think they have a right to. There is too much at stake, I think, to make it feasible to keep relevant information out of their hands. I imagine their most common problem will continue to be what EJ reported — mixups in documentation that damage innocent people, and that these innocent people must then sort out for themselves as best they can.
FICO really is more interested in estimating credit correctly than it is in ensuring that people cannot escape past mistakes. For example, FICO 9 (many institutions are still stuck on FICO 5 and will be for the foreseeable future) treats medical debt differently from other debt, when previous FICO #s hadn’t. FICO 9 doesn’t do that to be nice, or compassionate, or even “fair”, but because mounting evidence showed that the change leads to better predictions of creditworthiness.
Oh. And here is a wonderful example. I stumbled across this story by accident.
Illegal alien drug runner beheads special needs 13 year old American girl after making her watch as her grandmother was stabbed to death. This happened just outside Huntsville Alabama.
On the news? Not in my paper Not on any news outlet I have seen. I tripped over the story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution quite by accident. And while googling the incident returns some regional accounts, hardly any mention the immigration status. The one below does … at the very end.
http://m.live5news.com/live5news/db_383282/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=pfy6SENC
THE PLAIN DEALER: “Ohio’s Paper of Temporary Record”.
My goodness. You might think that would make the news.
If the victim had been a black woman and the murderer had been a white male in a MAGA hat, I think that might have made the news.
So take the case of an inebriated college student with a clean criminal record stumbling from the campus bar back to his dormitory. He has an urgent need to urinate. (Who hasn’t been there). For some quick relief. Local police officer arrested for public urination, a “sex offense.” The kid carries a sex offender label for life.
Do you really think that is fair? To me, it is a perfect case for expungement.
No, it’s not fair. That’s a perfect case for reforming the “sex offense” classification. Let that man explain his youthful indiscretion to any to question his record.
OK, so consider the following scenario:
A guy commits statutory rape with his underage girlfriend. They are too far apart in age to be protected by Romeo and Juliet laws (laws which say it’s not statutory rape if the age difference is small enough), but even though the guy was, according to the law, technically old enough to have known better, he’s still pretty young, and it seems like it’s probably not a case of an adult exploiting a minor.
But… maybe it was. After all, according to the law, even with a Romeo and Juliet clause, this young man was old enough to know better. There is, therefore, some ambiguity as to whether this was just a disastrous youthful folly, or actual predatory behavior.
What if this young man got put on the registry for a limited length of time, just in case he is a predator, then removed after a few years if he doesn’t reoffend in that time?
We have statutory rape laws for a reason. Someone committing statutory rape isn’t just taking his willie out for a wiz and getting caught, it really is a sexual offense. But it’s the kind of sexual offense that, if committed young enough, seems like an offense you don’t have to be a hardened pervert to commit.
Moreover, there are other cases involving sexual contact between the young where the contact absolutely should be punished as a sexual offense (because it is) but it seems unreasonable to treat the young as hardened perverts deserving a brand of “sex offender” for life (which they often are). You can read about some of them here. It’s a harrowing read, I warn you. These kids deserved punishment, but not the punishment they received.
We’ve kind of drifted from the OP, which is about forcing private entities to expunge crime records. Whether the above adjustments to the sex offender registry are reasonable or not, which is certainly debatable, I maintain that silencing private entities reporting of old crimes is an egregious first amendment violation. And a terrible policy, too. I personally don’t believe any crime records should be expunged. Every potential employer or social acquaintance should be able to decide for themselves what grace a criminal should receive in the present day. Government should never be issuing “licenses to lie” about ones past.
No one is “forcing” cleveland.com to expunge anything. This is a volunteer effort. The OP is simply asking the question if this holds true to the tenets of journalism. Are they in the “truth” business or the social engineering business?
True enough, in this case. I was playing back in my mind the EU’s “right to be forgotten”. Chaps my [expletive].
That’s a rhetorical question, right?