Former tech CEO suing to get the record of his arrest removed from the internet
sf.gazetteer.co
sf.gazetteer.co
This isn't a problem that's going to be solved by lawsuits, though, partially because Streisand and partially because in most of the cases where someone's hurt by this the newspapers have no legal obligation to refrain from publishing, so there's no grounds to sue. What we need is to reevaluate the law in light of "the internet never forgets".
For their privacy.
An obvious one is that many fraud victims are often shamed for "falling for it."
That is not generally true. Or perhaps true in an idealised word, but in the real world many victims have a stigma attached to them.
Victims of scams are frequently seen as guilible or naive. I think if it were known that someone has been scammed before many would be hesitant to hire them in a postition of financial trust.
Similarly victims of rape are often portrayed in a bad light. People frequently question what did they do, or what did they wear such that what happened to them happened to them.
Female victims of domestic abuse are often portrayed as schemers who orchestrated false circumstances such that they can get their exes in trouble with the law. Male victims of domestic abuse are often portrayed as not manly enough to protect themselves.
Victims of workplace sexual harrasment are often portrayed as wrongdoers who just couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Someone who should just “took the compliment”, or perhaps be “less stuck up”. As if the real problem is that they reported what they reported as opposed to suffering it silently.
None of these attitudes are okay, but nevertheless they do exists. Being a victim of these specific crimes happens to be dishonorable and shamefull at least in some people’s eyes.
"Ourmandave was mistakenly identified by Internet Sleuths and is NOT the shooter in the Grassy Knoll."
I’m not sure what the right balance looks like, but it’s definitely not a straightforward issue to resolve.
I think you'll find that where the state has an interest in keeping something under wraps it will be kept under wraps. Most arrest reports are of the casual voyeuristic kind, not serious journalism trying to keep the government accountable.
The current POTUS and O.J. Simpson come to mind.
Bad week to say this, given Ross Ulbricht was just pardoned. There's zero chance he would've been pardoned without all the publicity around his arrest and incarceration.
Is it worth it? That likely depends on how highly you prioritize the protection of liberty. It’s ultimately a personal call, and I don't mean that as a judgement one way or the other.
The reason we publicise arrests is to check the police against disappearances.
As publication seems necessary to help free people who should not be jailed, or to keep people from being disappeared the authorities find inconvenient, it seems some other solution should be found for the ruined lives due to publication, not that we just trade some number of ruined lives around by not publicizing.
Florida has the worst possible version of this, where local governments/PDs appear to revel in publishing mugshots with virtually no pretense. But if I was a taxpaying citizen in SF, I believe I would be right in feeling entitled to read more about why a domestic violence case with a pre-existing written statement was dismissed and then sealed.
As you say, this case is the exception, but there has to be a decent middle ground that allows exceptions and doesn't allow casual voyeurism.
If you release arrest records, people who are innocent have their reputations sullied.
If you don't release arrest records, it's easier for the police to do questionable things (particularly to the poor and otherwise disadvantaged) without it being visible to the media, public, and those that might seek to right these wrongs.
(Why so many arrests that don't lead to charges is interesting. People who prove innocent is one cause, and another is prosecutors only advancing really strong cases to maximize conviction rates is another. These are hard to tell apart.)
So, the right now when we publish arrest records we give police the tool to create some lasting harm to people without strong proof, but make it harder for them to capriciously arrest people or for prosecutors to abuse their discretion.
If every arrest is published with both first and last name in the local newspaper, which is then archived online and fully indexed, that doesn't seem to be serving the cause of government transparency so much as the cause of sensational local news.
I also think that allowing publication of the arrest but without the full name of the alleged criminal would address concerns about government accountability while not handing a dangerous reputational weapon to the police.
I think "this is 'public' information that you can't publish" is a yucky slippery slope.
There are no preordained guarantees that any specific things will be or not be in the “public space”.
Hot take: you could have professinal journalists who have trafficked in the incidents but reserved publication of them investigate patterns of misbehavior in community institutions like the police.
I mean, you can't now, as we seem to have crossed some kind of rubicon and abandoned investigative professional journalism for blogspam and tabloid, but that had been the functioning alternative for a while there. Maybe we can find a new functioning alternative?
Maybe there was a little more effort, beyond writing up a tweet or Reddit conversation. But at its core Journalism is narrative crafting (or narrative repeating). And fueled by upper class peer recognition.
In Germany, the media aren't legally allowed to publish the full names of suspects, only first name and first letter of surname. What if the law said law enforcement had to release all arrest records promptly to the media, but without surnames or photographs?
I agree, although I think that middle ground is elusive :-)
Two things that strike me as easy to do and unequivocally good from a civics/civil liberties perspective: forbidding "mugshot" journalism (cf. Florida) and forbidding "perp walks" by local PDs. Both disproportionately punish the poor/underprivileged and directly promote the kind of reputational sullying that local PDs revel in.
Criminal charges are public information in Florida [1].
[1] http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...
(Maybe the devil is in the details here? I don't know if Florida requires releasing the mugshot with arrest records, or whether that's something that municipalities do because there's local demand for it, or what.)
I'd love to see people take the real lesson here - an arrest proves nothing of guilt, and it's surprisingly easy for cops to falsely arrest someone (whether they intended to or not).
Our legal system is flawed enough as it is. When there are real concerns that can be raised over some cases that make it all the way to conviction we should be treating arrest records about as seriously a a politician promising the moon in a stump speech.
An innocent unless proven guilty law. Employers, et cetera, may not conclude adversely from criminal charges absent a guilty plea or conviction.
In the US at least, being arrested (or even accused) of certain things can end your career. Because, even it it's proven you didn't do it, no company will touch you with a 10 foot pole, because people (who don't care/know that you were innocent) will avoid the company if they hire you.
There is no known solution to this problem.
Yes, that's the point of such a law. The company gets to deflect blame to it.
Could you face the same because of gay/trans/etc hiring? That's the point of anti-discrimination laws - that nobody is allowed to discriminate and thus the public outrage is diluted if all are hiring the "undesireables".
I do agree though, there's no good solution to the problem. That's one of the biggest indicators for me that state regulation, at least enforceable regulation, isn't the right answer.
Companies, employees, industry organizations, etc can all come up with their own solutions that they're happy with though. A primary feature of federalism is allowing smaller groups to try different solutions, its pretty good at more quickly finding a solution that may actually work well enough universally
We already have discrimination laws on the books in the US that can't reliably be enforced for this exact reason. I have heard multiple accounts of very clear discrimination taking place in org hiring practices, but they are never documented and when discussed everyone is very careful with their words.
It won't be entirely effective. But it gives companies plausible deniability. I've been the one who voiced up because a sealed marital-dispute arrest came up in an archival background check. Having such a law would have meant doing so was unremarkable, a routine comment.
Are you going to erase their memories Men-In-Black style ?
Anti-discrimination laws also fail to protect people from the social consequences of the unwarranted publicity.
According to the constitution, innocence is an intrinsic human property.
I didn't say it was right, but I do believe that looking at it from the perspective of the burden being placed on a company is looking in the wrong direction. The names should not even be released unless convicted or settled--or at earliest at pre-trial (since more evidence can come forward if it's there). Those without charges should not have their name in the public, and that's where the focus should be.
> how would that work for types of people who maybe are arrested without being charged as a result of a protected attribute?
As I said, I am unsure how it works for hiring, but for firing it could be a violation of company policy and that's what the firing is for, not a protected attribute.
Lines like this can't be drawn easily. When in doubt inaction from the government should be the default. In this case that would mean the government not publicizing names at all, just process a case and move on.
The public has direct interest in the company. More importantly, an arrest record alone means very little and if the person wasn't convicted they are supposed to be presumed innocent.
There is no legal need for jails and police to release all of the details and photos that they do. A simple notice that a person is in police custody fulfills the argument against hidden arrests, while also not providing enough to damage a reputation. Announcing arrest reasons before charges have even been laid is unconscionable in a world where googling a name is this easy.
But the US has moved much more towards "no smoke without fire", leaving the release of names in an antiquated place.
Bogus charges get dropped all the time, but the mugshot and uncharged arresting reason are still posted for all.
This is a dangerous tool in the hands of a flawed institution. We know that people get arrested for trumped up charges, or outright fabrications that later get silently dropped.
Point being, if all you do is maintain a list of names of who you have in custody, you are fulfilling the American Habeas Corpus requirements. There's no constitutional requirement that mugshots need to be released publicly on the internet, there's no rule that the police need to announce what crime a person is suspected of before a charge has been laid. Americans can maintain a healthy distrust of police without wholesale public release on the internet of the details of an arrest.
The idea is simple though, and I don't think it requires anything other than old ideas.
A person is innocent until proven guilty. Period. End of story. An arrest proves very little and says nothing of guilt, just take it for what it is.
The news may portray things wrong but people should be expected to, and given the trust to, think for themselves. The news can talk about an arrest however they want, its up to hear it, think critically, and take whatever meaning from it that I choose to take.
It does, though you have to take that with a grain of salt. It isn't hard to find examples of arrests that go no where and were based on weak probable cause.
The wright one puts behind probable cause also depends a lot on how much they respect the police. When people call for defending the police, for example, I wouldn't expect they care at all about an arrest record.
I'm on board with this only to the extent of better supporting informed consent. The answer, in my opinion, is never to have someone in charge that believes they know what is best and forces that solution on everyone.
That model is just too fragile, to dehumanizing to the those being mandated to, and too centralizing of authority that can be abused by someone later.
Immigration is a case where its legally used against you. Technically I believe its a case where law enforcement isn't directed to go out of their way to enforce immigration laws, but if you interact with the police and they find you to be here illegally it becomes a situation where their guidance is to suddenly begin enforcing it.
And neither does a guilty verdict in a court of law. An arrest is a data point that we can use to inform our opinion of someone just as a verdict is.
We all agree to live in a system where a guilty verdict reached BT a jury of your peers means that you were legally found guilt. That still doesn't technically mean you did it, but it does mean you are legally deemed guilty.
Is the court system flawless? Absolutely not, I've seen that first hand. But guilt, in a legal sense, has a definition and is directly linked to that jury verdict.
Coz employers, potential spouses, or heck even potential friends aren't going to share your loft ideals.
Totally screwed my day, ticket was dropped but that didn't save me from getting hauled to jail, fingerprinted, and thrown in a cell for 6 hours before they wrote me a ticket and kicked me out at 3 in the morning in downtown ~20 miles from home with no cell phone and no one able to help me out.
The problem is the significant mismatch between the stigma of being arrested and the ease and frequency in which police perform arrests.
Arrests do not imply guilt but arresting someone later found to be not guilty should be incredibly embarrassing for the police. But this is at odds with the unhealthy amount of vindictiveness found in many societies. You get people frothing at the mouth about how cops don’t seem to arrest people so easily. Politicians are perpetually harder on crime because that satisfies fearful minds. But the price of running a society in such a broken manner eventually comes due.
In the US, we have defamatory and libel case law for a reason.
When you grant criminals rights over victims, the world becomes a worse place.
What world do you want to live in ?
it is unclear to me whether US law and precedent has the idea of "half-truths" being defamatory. In this case, I'd imagine that would apply if it can be applied; the plaintiff was technically arrested, but legally the arrest itself was expunged. So telling people he was arrested is a truth that definitely isn't telling the whole truth.
He already lost his job, news is out there, so at some point I wonder if the effect doesn't matter anymore.
I gotta think it doesn't really matter if more distant randos (you, me) know.
They find social media posts, videos, photos, discussion comments, etc.
With deepfakes, this is gonna get much worse.
Just today, I was checking on a signup request for our app, and came across a video of the person that I think was a hit piece; maybe a deepfake.
I still approved them, but the posting was clearly designed to cause them harm. I have no idea whether or not it did.
You're checking on everyone who signs up for an app?
We Serve a small, specific demographic, and privacy is pretty important. I’d much rather not do that kind of thing. I just want to avoid admitting obvious bad actors.
We get a lot of scammers that try to sign up. We have probably let in a ringer or two, but they won’t find the app especially fruitful. It’s pretty locked-down. Facebook would be a much better hunting ground.
Also, said demographic is exactly the type that might get hit pieces posted, so it is actually an argument in favor of them being the “real deal.”
Also, the "effect" could be to ruin an independent reporter, not just hide or explain the arrest.
Faith in the justice system is almost zero, and widespread skepticism of mass media means that “Internet Guy online with 0 firsthand knowledge” is often viewed as just as credible as major news outlets.
I don't have an answer, but it is a sad state of affairs that people aren't incorrect to embrace.
I don’t remember that anyone has asked me. I know this is an often cited justification for laws but it is kinda suspect and not well tought through.
> the detectives that worked this case
I would trully love to read their opinion / notes on the case.
Sealed, for undisclosed reasons, with no determination as to his guilt or lack thereof.
>The lawsuit leans heavily on a California law that makes it illegal to publish an arrest report after it has been sealed by a court. The law has been attacked by First Amendment advocates, who say it violates free speech protections, strengthened in this instance because the information is an issue of public interest — an argument Blackman contests.
It was exactly this understanding that allowed closeted public figures in politics, entertainment, to navigate a time when it wasn't okay for their personal lives to be made public. Journalists and editors were often aware of stories that could be told, but believed that their duty wouldn't be served by reporting on them.
Journalism did not always look like that, and did not everywhere look like that, but it was the prevailing norm.
We're now in a very different time again, where any "scoop" that stirs moral outrage, earns lurid eyeballs, or undermines a public figure is not only fair game, but the ideal career-making story.
Everything in the initial report is pretty horrible.
If you're arrested for assaulting your girlfriend, it's smart to err on the side of caution and not associate with you in any way. I certainly will not hire you.
"What about false accusations etc etc?"
That's exactly why arrest records should be public.
Wouldn't such a form of lookup, in itself, defeat the point of trying to make it secret?
Why are police validating sealed reports? Seems like a major flaw.
Before today I did not know who Maury Blackman was. I now know that he was arrested for domestic violence in 2021.
Here is the original news report: https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/the-covert-gig-work-surve...
Peter Thiel had a bigger bankroll.
Yes. It was maddening seeing news orgs everywhere yawn at this process. It was an obvious proving ground event - and today is being more widely deployed.
- "Weinstein's attorney Charles Harder, who was then known for filing the suit that bankrupted Gawker, said his client would be suing The New York Times,[140] but by October 15, 2017, Harder was no longer working for Weinstein.[141]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Weinstein_sexual_abuse_...
There were multiple other news companies (not including the Times) that were successfully dissuaded from publishing anything about the Weinstein accusations, by his litigation threats.
They were publicly sharing an intimate video of Hogan without his consent, he got a court order telling them to stop and they just refused to obey it, stating that they had a first amendment right to do it. Except, Gawker got the constitution wrong - and apparently didn't even ask a lawyer before refusing to obey the order -, which is why the later law against sharing intimate videos without consent is uncontroversial
Hogan was in the top 1% and even he couldn't afford justice when a large media organisation committed a blatant violation of his rights. His need for Thiel's support isn't an example of oppression of those organisations, it's an example of their power.
Not sure if there have been lawsuits around those as well.
What conviction?
Let me rephrase :
The Streisand effect in full force. Hiring a competent and transparent person—someone who shows remorse, regret, and explains how they’ve grown from a difficult situation—isn’t necessarily the real issue. But hiring someone who shifts the blame onto others for making past incidents public? That’s an entirely different problem.
But I guess it's very easy for you to write such a comment without ever establishing that the person is actually guilty, as if, in domestic violence, people should be considered guilty unless proven innocent? Thankfully you are not a prosecutor.
If there had just been a report with that info, and no arrest the damage to him would have been about the same.
I'd like to see more people spell out what they mean by that overused term.
I certainly wouldn't.
so this fella caught a case for domestic violence? jam the internet with bunches of fake negative charges across a swath of fake internet pages.
caught doing something stupid and reddit picked it up? jam pack it with a firehose of other plausible fake negative stories.
provide a service, get boatloads of cash, and contribute to the deadification. makes no sense to limp wrist-edly moonwalk into the dead future - barrel through it with tanks. its not like google is working all that great these days anyway
I'll bet that he turns out getting a big rep bump from this, though.
If it were Texas or Oklahoma, there's a good chance that he'd be thrown in jail, or get a wood shampoo, at his next traffic stop, but in San Francisco, this will not be buried.