Expungement of Criminal Records Becomes a Fiction
The New York Times has an interesting article about how the electronic age has stripped the expungement of criminal records of practical effect.
Before, when courts used paper records, they were destroyed or put in a closet with an "expunged" stamp on them, making them inaccessible to third parties.
Now, courts keep electronic records and companies buy criminal records information. So even if the arrest or conviction is later expunged, the company still has the record of its existence.
Private database companies say they are diligent in updating their records to reflect the later expungement of criminal records. But lawyers, judges and experts in criminal justice say it is common for people to lose jobs and housing over information in databases that courts have ordered expunged.
One judge puts it this way:
Thomas A. Wilder, the district clerk for Tarrant County in Fort Worth, said he had received harsh criticism for refusing, on principle, to sell criminal history records in bulk.
“How the hell do I expunge anything,” Mr. Wilder asked, “if I sell tapes and disks all over the country?”
The reality is this:
Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer in Miami, tells her clients that expungement is a waste of time. “To tell someone their record is gone is essentially to lie to them,” Ms. Rodriguez-Taseff said. “In an electronic age, people should understand that once they have been convicted or arrested that will never go away.”
Some people are suing. But that's a long and expensive road to travel.
Mr. Guevares, now 33, was convicted of disorderly conduct more than a decade ago. New York considers that a violation like a traffic infraction rather than a crime and bars database companies from reporting such offenses to employers.
But Acxiom, a database company, reported the disorderly conduct charges to the Tyco Healthcare Group, which had offered Mr. Guevares a job in 2004. Tyco promptly withdrew the offer, one that would have doubled Mr. Guevares’s salary, to $46,000. It based its decision, his lawsuit says, on its mistaken understanding that he had committed a misdemeanor and had lied on his application about whether he had ever been “convicted of any crime which was not expunged or sealed by a court.”
I agree with Mr. Guevares' attorney:
“They should not have been vacuuming up this information in the first place...."
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