Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Breaking news! Mrs Clinton does a good job representing someone she was supposed to represent... in light of that, who'd want her to represent US?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
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.
@anon: "Holy fuck that's amazingly creepy. Hillary Clinton effectively got a man who raped a 12 year old off scot-free. Your champion of liberalism and women's rights, right there."
'Hillary Clinton asked to be removed from a 1975 rape case in which her client was accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl' ref
Then seal arrest records six months after a person leaves custody.
When you're a young lawyer fresh out of law school, I can't imagine you have much choice in the way of cases. Not if you're going to get very far in your law career. Are you suggesting that an accused child rapist doesn't deserve competent legal counsel?
Thunderous applause!
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
Ms. Clinton was then "able to seize on loopholes" to help who she represented.
Indeed, this seems to be an ideal trait to have in Washington. Whether or not she would chose to be representative of "us" except for increasingly limited definitions of "us" is, however, another question entirely.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Given the way the world works today? Most people would likely be happy with an accused rapist being murdered outright immediately. Innocent until proven guilty died with the birth of Twitter
Because of this case and others like it, eventually internationally based search engines will become untenable.
That's not when this happened, however. This was 1975, not 2015. How many of today's voters, indeed Hillary's main supporter base, were even alive in 1975? I wasn't, and I can't begin to fathom how it must have been for a female lawyer in 1975.
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
And if she had botched her job, the child rapist could have just appealed on that basis and gotten off scot free. The United States has this thing called due process, and that's what stops the folks like you from just lining up anyone accused of a heinous crime and shooting them. Every one is entitled to a competent defendant, regardless of whether they are guilty or not, and if Mrs. Clinton had somehow been removed from the case, then some other lawyer would have just been assigned.
When we lose our moral compass is when we, as a society, decide that due process isn't important anymore. When we revoke the rights of the accused to a proper defendant, to a proper trial, and try them in the Court of Public Opinion. It's been done in the past, and it generally works out to a singular solution, with no quarter and no recourse. But being accused of a crime doesn't mean that one has committed it. Even though Mrs. Clinton was convinced he committed the crime, she wasn't a judge, it wasn't her call to make. That's the way our society is built, that's our system of justice.
Yeah, a lawyer standing up for the principles of law is "amazingly creepy". You sir are an idiot.
I was replying to your last sentence. In the modern world the answer is no, people DON'T want accused rapists to have competent council, because being accused of rape these days means you are guilty as far as the public is concerned. See: The Duke Lacrosse debacle.
Holy fuck that's amazingly creepy. Hillary Clinton effectively got a man who raped a 12 year old off scot-free.
Your champion of liberalism and women's rights, right there.
He was convicted and got a sentence of one year in jail and four years probation in a plea bargain.
First of all, that is not "scot-free", and don't pretend that your use of the word "effectively" makes what you said anything other than misleading.
Secondly, she was appointed to the case by the judge and asked to be let off but was denied.
Finally, it's up to the judge and prosecutor to set the sentence.
They're the ones that are to blame in cases like this.
This bullshit about lawyers representing clearly guilty clients because 'its what we do' is ... well, bullshit.
People are entitled to equally competent representation on both sides. The reason the guilty people need lawyers is to prevent getting ass fucked on the grounds of not knowing how the process or the legal system works.
Why not just shoot them all one by one. They don't have legal representation and thus won't know that stealing a loaf of bread does not get a death penalty right? When you take representation away from the guilty you ultimately end up taking representation away from the innocent and start punishing people for what you *THINK* happened.
I mean heck even with proper legal representation we have shown time and time again that we get it wrong and lock up innocent parties. I suppose you want to take away an appeals process too, because people are "obviously guilty".
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.
No they cannot.
Private entities need to be regulated on their behaviour, and forcibly modified if their existence or operations are against the public good.
Secondly if Google wanted to be treated as a purely private entity, perhaps it should not have sent its CEO to schmooze at the Bilderberg meetings.
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'
Indeed. It does seem like she is more likely to favour people more like her (ie. competant in their profession or hard-working) over those who had their success via luck or inheritance.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
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.
I've decided to blow off the downmod I just gave you in order to explain something to you:
1. Clinton was appointed by the court to defend an accused rapist.
2. She asked to be excused from the case, presumably because she knew or at least strongly suspected the defendant had actually committed the offence.
3. The judge would not let her off the case.
ExecSummary: Hillary Clinton was *ordered* by the State to act to the best of her ability in the interest of the defendant. And this is exactly what she appears to have done. You may or may not like her or her politics, but in this case *she did the job which she was legally and ethically bound to perform*. If you cannot understand why she did so, then you've never any business ever voting in a US election or especially ever serving on a jury in a US criminal trial.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
There is this thing called the "cab rank principle", which means that lawyers are supposed to accept any case that comes their way. The only grounds for refusing a case are that they are already working on one and therefore don't have the time, or that they don't have the skills to do it properly.
She had a choice between (a) defending the client assigned to her and (b) incurring the wrath of the court for failing to obey its lawful order. (b) could have meant gaol time and/or disbarment.
Apparently you think its Ok for someone to keep their job/career at the cost of someone else getting raped.
You'd imply that Clinton's defence of her client caused the rape to occur? That's pretty silly.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Then you lack a moral compass and need t get some help. I'm suggesting that when you know the fucker is guilty, you put his ass in jail, not defend him.
If your defense lawyer won't offer competent counsel it won't ever be a fair trial. Everybody speculates, even defense lawyers. The prosecutor, the judge, the jury members, the journalists, everyone on the peanut gallery got a personal opinion. You can pick one from the lynch mob as judge, jury and executioner and you got the court of personal opinion instead of the court of public opinion, it's still a shitty system.
That's why we have a system built on evidence. The prosecutor lays out the evidence in favor, the defense lawyer the evidence against, the judge is the referee and the jury decides if it's proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Now certainly there's a lot of subjective evaluation on what testimony is credible, evidence is reliable, theories are plausible and so on.
It's not supposed to be gut feel speculation based on superficial appearance and behavior, maybe you get an impression he's creepy and sleazy "hood rat" but that doesn't make him more guilty.than a slick smooth talker in a suit. At least it's not supposed to, but that's what personal opinion often is - how well the person in front of us matches the mental image we have of "that kind" of person.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Or why not mention the Taliban? You know the ones that wanted some form of proof for the involvement of Osama Bin Laden in 9/11 before they would extradite him?
No matter if this was just a way to delay the process USA decided that they didn't have to do anything and (as usual) responded with an invasion, starting a war without any legal or moral justification.
And (again as usual) the USA started the war without a declaration of it - something that is incredibly wrong when the Japanese did the same* at Pearl Harbor.
(* in fact we now know that parts of the US government knew about the plans and that the Japanese had intended to declare the war. This was delayed by their slow decryption process - US code crackers were more efficient and knew about the war declaration _before_ the Japanese embassy personnel did)
That is the best response I have seen in a long time.
let me say why:
( all of this is my view and communicates properly to my style of trying to understand, also I suck at grammar so good writing is impressing to me )
a) re-asserted the right of innocent until proven guilty, not only to the HC but the party she had to defend. ( something which is very important to me )
b) proved a point of; she had a job, she was required to do it, then did it ( don't know the outcome but she did it).
c) added humor ( my perception ) with style, told the person to research the facts before stating something dumb and learn more before you vote.
Thank you, and I hope you have helped others whom get the chance to read, to become smarter
if you see me, smile and say hello.
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
The fact that a person did their job to the best of their abilities and succeeded, has no say in politics.
Facts are there so they can be twisted to show how evil they are or ignored. We can't have an actual human being in the office, ones who have good and bad movements in their life. They will somehow be completely virtuous while having the drive, ambition, thick skin and aggression to make it threw the political system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
She wasn't ordered to slander the victim and she would not be getting any mistrial or whatever for not slandering her. That is how the law works.
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.
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.
Please read up on the Central Park Five, or just about any lynching in the South: rushes to judgement are hardly limited to liberals worrying about lacrosse players in the past decade.
At its best, our legal system is supposed to protect the rights of the accused — falsely or otherwise —with due process to ensure justice happens. The court of public opinion can try to infect a court of law with its biases, but the reverse is not something I'll hold my breath for.
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
this is standard procedure for ALL rape cases, the world over, particularly those involving victims under the age of majority.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
not only that, she could be disbarred for misrepresenting her client.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Well, you know books do cause people to have differing viewpoints and differing viewpoints are just one of the many microaggressions out there, so we probably should be burning them all, except maybe the ones that help convince us how our microaggressions are hurting others.
Thank you for the kind words, Sir|Ma'am|Flipper.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm suggesting that when you know the fucker is guilty, you put his ass in jail, not defend him.
Yeah, who needs judges and lawyers and stuff?
If the police arrest someone they're obviously guilty and a trial by jury is just a waste of money.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Google should not give in.
The sites hosting the stories should.
If somebody had his penalty and it ends, then he should have a chance again. If you do not think so, you should not wish him bad google hits, but wish for a law providing a longer penalty.