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Japanese Court Orders Google To Delete Past Reports Of Man's Molestation Arrest
AmiMoJo writes: The Saitama District Court has ordered Google Inc. to delete past reports on a man's arrest over molestation from its online search results after ruling that they violate the man's personal rights. The man, who was arrested about three years ago after molesting a girl under 18, and fined 500,000 yen (£2600, $4000). "He harbors remorse over the incident and is leading a new life. The search results prevent him from rehabilitating himself," the man's defense counsel said. The presiding judge recognized that the incident was not of historical or social significance, that the man is not in public office and that his offense was relatively minor. He concluded there was little public interest in keeping such reports displayed online three years after the incident. The judge acknowledged that search engines play a public role in assisting people's right to know.
(AmiMoJo spotted the story on Surado, the new name for Slashdot Japan.)
Government officials should be allowed to hide and subsequently destroy public records, at their own discretion.
but a whimper.
but a whimper.
but applause.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They certainly have a different approach than we do. They fine them, we make them live under bridges.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Google should not give into this. All records should be available publicly until the end of time. If you don't want to be recorded in history then don't fuck up.
in effect.
The court just drew massive attention to this guy that wouldn't otherwise have been there. Doh!
Don't do it in the first place. Not like it's hard to avoid.
In the old days you could shun someone from your village (like a dunbar / ~150 sized village where ever knew everyone), but now, how can you shun someone from the planet?
(witness protection type program,but for "heinous" criminals who have server their court appointed sentences?)
Why do arrest records have to be public?
Lets be real here. If you work in most industries, the first thing the employer is going to do is pull a Lexis-Nexus report, then a NCIC check. These show not just convictions, but -arrests-, and if someone is -arrested- for anything, even if it is a case of a night in the drunk tank, no job. The reason for this is that the HR people I've asked say that a conviction can be bought off, but if a police officer decides to take the time to pull out the handcuffs and do paperwork, the person is a criminal.
Lets be real, for all but the most heinous crimes, arrest records need to be private, and if the person arrested has charges dropped or was acquitted, the -arrest- record will be expunged.
Japan is doing the right thing. You have to force private companies with their databases propagating among each other to remove info, or any government expunging of records of people who are perfectly innocent does not matter at all.
I also respect the fact that even showing someone in chains or handcuffs (other than bondage stuff obviously) implies guilt. During my criminal justice classes, there was definitely a jury bias against a candidate who was forced to wear a belly chain or stun belt versus one who wasn't.
If Google wasn't the only search engine we could still find important things like this when we need to know something.
fr0m one fo7der on
In the country where I live, I don't think criminal records are available via on-line services but employers do ask for a copy of your police record. Employers obviously have a bias against anyone who's record isn't blank.
IMO, asking for such a record should be illegal and instead, employers (subject to signing an NDA) should be allowed to ask the police to verify that the person in question has no convictions *relevant to the job being applied for*.
I thought I still had mod points. The above comment is the only comment so far worth up-modding.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
Seems logical. And unlikely - for good reasons.
Plagiarism!!!
She's in good company. Don't believe that the parties are different.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
one thing that has been proven repeatedly is that people dont change because you punish them. in order for them to change, they have to want to change and even then they are likely to fail. some things just can't be changed without behavioral reconditioning aka "brainwashing" and it's not always permanent.
as for it's relevance, would you want a guy like this to be a teacher?
just sayin.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It would be nice if every search involving Mitsubishi or one of their subsidiaries landed on the Rape of Nanking followed by WW II Comfort Women, just to supply some historical perspective.
Or maybe those historical facts should also be purged from the internet?
I can add a little perspective to this. In Japan there is a very high (over 99%) conviction rate of arrested people. This is for two reasons. Japanese police tend not to arrest someone unless there's more than enough evidence to convict, and to save face Japanese courts tends to convict all edge cases. Innocent until proven guilty is only true in theory in the Japanese system.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Over here its a standard entrapment procedure by government officals set a teddy bear cam and snap an erotic pose then the hair piece and blondie have their woe-b-unto he didnt register herpa derpa derpa.
Google provides search results, not reports. If this report is truly of no public interest anymore, the court should order the people who put the report online to take it offline. The court knows full well that if they ordered the original reports in newspapers and in public records offline, there would be a storm of protest, so they go after Google.
Stop going after search engines. They index the web. Also, they pop up and go under overnight for the most part. Where is Bing mentioned? Yahoo? Duckduckgo? Literally any of the over 700 search engines available on the internet (in just English, not even gonna get into the thousands in other languages) can or have indexed this information. By making Google remove links...you are just forcing HR departments and the press to use other engines. Its little more than a thinly veiled stab at Google for being so popular OR its a display of massive incompetence by elected and appointed officials worldwide.
If you want to remove information from the web... you must go after the websites. In this instance no, you cannot argue that its undue burden, because there are only a handful of sites that show public arrest information and public court records for each country. Unlike piracy, your average person doesn't care to make their own arrest record index for shits n giggles or as a middle finger to The Man.
The right to be forgotten is pure censorship. If the government wants to approve it though, they need to get a lot more savvy about technology, the internet and what exactly the fuck a search engine actually does. Cause every day the governments of the world only make themselves appear more and more ignorant by doing this kind of crap.
Then seal arrest records six months after a person leaves custody.
is changing their face to laughing man
right?
Thunderous applause!
That should NEVER be expunged from the public record.
Those who forget that past are apt to repeat it.
If he's slapped in the face for the rest of his life, so be it - he got much less than he deserved. He should have been surgically mutilated into female form and then strapped down naked in a an all male prison to be raped until death.
Google is a private entity.. they can do whatever the hell they want on their service.
If the man feels "regretful" and all that, well maybe he shouldn't have done that in the first place. This serve as an example for others, what not to do. If a criminal can just suddenly have everything about himself removed from the internet, why would he care about rehabilitating himself? There's no incentive there.
I find it arrogant for any group to tell another they can't handle the truth, so to speak. Maybe arrest records are unreliable metrics. Shouldn't adults be able to figure that out?
-Dave
Because of this case and others like it, eventually internationally based search engines will become untenable.
but a whimper.
but applause.
Thunderous applause!
So... butt applause?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
You don't actually believe that, because otherwise you'd give up on your sulky teenager, never bother to send anyone to school etc etc. The reality is that the prisons are full of YOUNG people - because they usually commit their offences whilst relatively young but then mature to the point where they stop their crimes. Of course a few don't - but surprisingly the recidivism rates for sexual offences are far lower than that for most offences.
Is this guy single? Maybe we should hook him up with Barbra Streisand.
If people care enough about it to allow it to affect how they judge the man today, then it still has at least some historical significance... if for no other reason than to give the people that this man meets the tools with which to know what the truth is. In the end, if he has genuinely repented, then it will still be up to each and every person he meets to evaluate the man for how he presents himself today, and it is THEIR problem, not Google's if they might still judge him harshly for it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>The search results prevent him from rehabilitating himself
Wrong. What may prevent him is the society. It is up to them to decide whether actually after 3 years his guilt is no more. And then there is no problem showing such results.
>there was little public interest in keeping such reports displayed online three years after [...]
There is little interest in public in reading books nowadays as well. Maybe we should burn all books?
There is enormous public interest in keeping events from the past that become public once accessible today. Because only such approach allows us to analyse the past and fix the future.
Imagine murder cases and death penalty records would be inaccessible. Then you would have no way to analyse the influence of that form of penalty on crime and to find correlation between hesitation in murderers when they may face such fate. Oh wait... it actually is hardly accessible data. Thank you for forgetting the past.
'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' - George Santayana
Historical significance is the opposite of superficial.
Pleb judgements are the synonym.
> evaluate the man today
No they won't. Innocent hardworking applicants don't even get that. That's why "10 years experience with Swift" is on your resume.
Put away the kneejerk, apparently it was a 17y old prostitute, not the knife-point kidnapping that CSI episodes have overhyped.
We don't know exactly what this guy did. Grabbing a 15 year old's ass once on public transport is quite a lot different than kidnapping and rape and should be treated as such. If he wants to clean up his act, he should be given a fair chance to do so.
Wait one second...
Actions have persistent consequences?
I didn't realize that.... I thought we were entitled to always get forgiveness or at least a do-over if we needed it, no matter what we did?
Signed,
All of modern culture.
-Styopa
This is an interesting 'how do you make a functioning society' problem.
The different interests at play are:
1) The public's right to know because they might need to avoid the guy.
2) The guy's right to start over after a forgive and forget time period because it can happen to anybody.
3) The media's right to publish anything that makes money because occasionally they publish something necessary.
I don't see any practical way to make the information magically go away.
The reverse might be an alternative.
If you are going to hold, publish, index, or act on the original information,
you should also be required to do the same for the current information,
so you can see if the guy is now a model citizen.
The non-existent "Right To Be Forgotten" recently invented by our progressive European friends strikes again.
And what it means is, as soon as the technologies for altering human memories are perfected, the same "right" will be enforced on humans. In TFA's example, that molested girl herself retains her memory of the crime — and the criminal. Will some future court-decision not order her to undergo a memory-wiping procedure to help the man rehabilitate himself?
Need not be a crime — your ex-wife may demand, you subject yourself to such memory-cleansing wiping out the good times you once shared as part of a divorce settlement. And employees leaving a company or a government organization may be required to surrender their memories of trade secrets or even of ever working there...
Well, we've been told for decades already, that one has a right to a "safety net" even if other people must be robbed at gun-point (via the IRS) to pay for it. For fewer decades we've been told, one has a right to enter into a business transaction in a place of "public accommodation" — even if it happens against the other party's ("bigoted") will. Though everybody has (and should always have had) a right to engage in consensual sex with anybody else, a right to be considered "married" by people holding a different ("parochial") opinion on what the concept means was recently established instead.
This "Right To Be Forgotten" will not be far behind. Troll my elbow, it is coming.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If he didn't want people to know he molested a child he should have not molested a child
The guy was found guilty. This is factual information on a guilty party for a heinous crime. Too bad for him, he made his choices and now has to live with them.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yet. What if that changes? Will Google be allowed to un-delete him? How will they know to do so?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Why should it be Google's problem if people are superficial?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We have had a local problem with companies refusing to hire people over rather old misdemeanor arrests. In a way imposing a permanent penalty for law breaking has its merits but we do see people with very minor violations suffering permanent harm even though only a small fine was the penalty. Yet I do see an issue with a job candidate who has a perfect record being passed over by someone who had a drunk driving conviction thirty years ago. Should we not always promote or hire the best?
he should fucking burn.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel