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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the PDF they link to, it doesn't say "has been arrested" it says "has criminal record". Maybe those 2 things are the same, but I'm not so sure.

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Criminal records would include all misdemeanors.

You can get a misdemeanor without ever being arrested. In some cases trivial things like speeding can be a misdemeanor requiring a court appearance.

25 years ago I got a misdemeanor citation for rollerblading on the sidewalk in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, which required me to make a court appearance and pay for a VERY expensive lawyer to get the charge thrown out. If instead I'd paid the $25 fine, I'd have had a permanent misdemeanor charge on my record.

Same thing in Maryland. Speeding is a criminal charge here.

Having a record of such a minor infraction doesn’t seem to me a problem, in and of itself. The problem would be if such records were public, available to potential employers, etc. If the records were private to the courts, that’d be something else. Not sure how it is in USA.

In the USA it is public record which in practice means anyone with money can get the record. This is potentially a large part of the high US recidivism. Once you have been convicted once, most employers will see the record and refuse to hire you forever.

No, it means anyone with — or without — money can get the record right here:

https://www.judyrecords.com/

I don’t think anybody particularly cares about non-violent misdemeanors, except maybe drug or alcohol offenses.

Felony on your record? Yeah, you’re basically fucked for life.

Adult criminal records are public in the US (juvenile records vary by state but are usually confidential, and I think in most states also automatically expunged after a certain period or age.)

It’s a difficult balance. On one hand, privacy is important. On the other hand, visibility into the system is an important check on the power of law enforcement. It’s especially important for arrests; you really, really do not want the police to be allowed to secretly jail people. But it’s important for other things too. In this example, if the police were using rollerblading citations as a way to harass a certain group of people, it’s good to have access to that information to be able to discover this.

So you're saying I should have paid the fine and had the charge recorded, creating a criminal record for myself?

Not in the least. I’m just saying there are good reasons for everything that did happen to be public record. (And some good reasons for privacy. There’s a conflict and a balance to be found.)

The solution is to make summary statistics available to the public but no names.

Just publicize that there have been 471 citations for rollerblading without listing the names of those affected.

> Not sure how it is in USA.

Assuming the record was as an adult, it will be reported publicly by the county (or other jurisdiction) court system and be on public record. This used to be a musty records keeping office somewhere you'd have to go in person and request the records of the individual in question - so without prior knowledge of where a conviction was it was difficult to "background check" people without extensive investigation.

Then these became digitized and put on-line most places.

The larger issue is data brokers who aggregate the records of literally everyone in the entire US (or close to it) into one database you can pay them to make lookups into. They send someone to every courthouse in the US (well, they sub-contract others who sub-contract, etc.) and get all new records. This builds a nationally searchable database that more or lives on indefinitely. All legal since the records are public information.

You can get records sealed and such by court order, but once it's aggregated it's basically a game of whack-a-mole. You can go further and get it expunged which typically requires a state governor signature or similar, where then you might have better luck with said data brokers as the penalties for reporting it are heavy in some states.

It's a very fractionalized system, built out of bailing wire and duct tape like most such records are in the US for historical reasons.

Some employers simply have a binary policy of "zero criminal records" and don't go any further into detail beyond that. Other employers are more lenient, but the more desirable a job is the more likely you are to run into the former policy.

I was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving for going the speed limit in heavy rain and hydroplaning into another car. My fault for sure, but a criminal charge seems over the top.

Spent $1,500 on a lawyer who negotiated it to a trivial “failure to maintain control” ticket with a maybe $100 fine.

The system is dumb. Or maybe it’s smart, giving people with means, like us, favorable treatment without having to outright say “poor people aren’t worthy.”

Frankly, I think the original sentence was accurate. If that had been a cyclist instead of a car then they’d be dead.

The speed limit is a limit, not a requirement. Driving fast in conditions where you can hydroplane is absolutely reckless.

Restricted access highway, no cyclists allowed or present.

I don't think “reckless” is the right word. Clueless, really. I didn’t know there was a problem until I lost traction.

Whatever you want to call it, do you really think that’s worth a criminal charge? Possibly destroying my livelihood over this? Do you think the possibility of criminal charges is what stops me from doing it again, versus the potential damage to life and property, including my own? Lay it out for me.

I was taught not to drive fast on roads like that, specifically due to the risk of hydroplaning. Significantly slower than the likely speed limit, unless the speed limit on your highway was 60 kmph. You never do know how good your braking action is going to be, so preemptively slowing down is the only option.

I don’t believe your driving was safe. I also don’t believe you were taught driving correctly, assuming you’re American, and I might also believe that driving slowly would have been equally dangerous, if the other cars did not.

Furthermore, I don’t believe a reckless driving charge without injury should be a criminal matter or that a criminal conviction should destroy someone’s livelihood.

However, four wrongs don’t make a right. It just makes a mess.

From your use of “kmph” I’m going to guess that you live in a country with decent driver training.

I’m in the US, where driver training goes just slightly beyond checking if the candidate is capable of fogging a mirror. I learned in a northern state so we learned a lot about how to deal with ice and snow, but I don’t think there was anything about rain. If there was, I’d forgotten it in the 20+ years since I last had any training or check.

I agree with you that my driving was unsafe and I wasn’t taught well. I don’t think my behavior even came close to criminal.

I am confused about your assessment of my charge. You previously said it was correct. Now you think it shouldn’t have been a criminal charge?

Well, I originally missed the “criminal” bit. I was agreeing that it was reckless. A misdemeanour wouldn’t be considered a criminal charge where I live; it goes through a similar system, but has far fewer implications.

The original fine seems reasonable.

Ok. Unfortunately that bit was the entire point. If it had been a “reckless driving” traffic ticket I wouldn’t have a problem with it and wouldn’t be commenting about it here.

You hit another vehicle, at excessive speed, in poor weather. Fortune meant that the occupants of that other vehicle were not injured or worse.

Writing it off as "Oh, I was just clueless" is a little downplaying.

Yes, it's a one off instance, but the stakes in vehicles can be very high, hence our requirements for licensing and insurance.

Well I met those requirements and still didn’t know enough to avoid this.

On one hand, there’s a responsibility to seek further knowledge and self-evaluate. I accept responsibility for not doing that here.

On the other hand, having the government sign off on your training as officially adequate, then threatening to jail you and put a conviction on your record when it wasn’t, seems rather uncool. Hold me liable for damages? Sure. Ticket me? Ok. But charge me with an actual crime?

People gain more experience. Many/most also naturally become more cautious with age. I know there's a school of thought here that if we just made licensing more time consuming and expensive--whatever the cost in employment possibilities etc.--problems would go away. But I'm not sure how much classes, beyond a certain point, for a young driver really help.

> I was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving for going the speed limit in heavy rain and hydroplaning into another car. My fault for sure, but a criminal charge seems over the top.

If they charged every rain related accident in Arizona as a criminal offence the court system would be clogged up for months after the monsoon season...

It says both. The 1 in 3 refers to those under 23.

> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23.

The has a criminal record refers to the population as a whole.

> [...] between 70 million and 100 million—or as many as one in three Americans—have some type of criminal record

Linked PDF: https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ...

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