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.)
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.
"Not that I don't get what you're saying, but if a woman molested your son (one of the many, many female child molesters) would you hunt her down and presumably kill her?"
My 10 year old son? Yes. My 17 year old son? No. There are many variables. How "under 18" was she?
My daughter was kidnapped when she was 10 years old an suffered a horrific 12 hours with a monster. Over 2 years later the monster still hasn't been to trial but that's coming up soon. He's looking at 3 life sentences + a few hundred years.
A history of sexual predation should never be erased from the public memory. I don't give a rip if this particular guy is "living a new life" -- if your brain is broke in such a way as to be attracted to kids then you should no more be allowed to walk the streets than a lion who thinks kids are tasty.
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.
Ar, what a monster. He should be burned alive, but not to death, and then allowed to recover just enough so that he can fully feel all of the spikes of the iron maiden that closes on him as a manticore drips acid into his eyes.
Am i doing this right? I have no end of sympathy for your daughter, but I'm clearly not as vengeance-driven as you are. At some point in our past we decided that eye-for-an-eye was not a workable approach to justice and three lifetimes plus hundreds of years for an offense of twelve hours, no matter how awful those twelve hours may have been, goes so far beyond eye-for-an-eye... There's some horrible disconnect when it comes to sex crimes. We load down the act of sex with so much baggage that it's social anathema to do anything mildly sexually deviant, and crimes related to sex are seen as absolutely horrifying while doing relatively little physical / financial / property damage. There is of course the psychological aspect, which I by no means wish to trivialize, but I can't help but think that the psychological damage is made as severe as it is by all of the baggage which we attach to sex.
I have heard people say, without hyperbole, that they think that rape is as bad or worse than murder. Many rape victims also seem to feel that - 13% of rape victims attempt suicide. Think about that. These are people, a large number of people, who genuinely believe that it's better to be dead than raped. That's a problem, a big one, and it's a problem of perception. The courts only reinforce this, if they're handing down life-ending sentences over rape offenses, and that feeds the problem further.
Back to TFA: molestation isn't rape. Without reading the article, I'd guess based on the sentence that the offense of the guy in question was pretty small. Maybe a grope on the train or something, happens pretty often on those crowded Japanese commuter trains. Is that also worth murder?
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?
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.
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.
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.