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Alleged Owners of Mugshots.com Have Been Arrested For Extortion (lawandcrime.com)
Reader schwit1 writes: The alleged owners of Mugshots.com have been charged and arrested. These four men Sahar Sarid, Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie, Thomas Keesee, and David Usdan only removed a person's mugshot from the site if this individual paid a "de-publishing" fee, according to the California Attorney General on Wednesday. That's apparently considered extortion. On top of that, they also face charges of money laundering, and identity theft.
If you read a lot of articles about crime, then you're probably already familiar with the site (which is still up as of Friday afternoon). They take mugshots, slap the url multiple times on the image, and post it on the site alongside an excerpt from a news outlet that covered the person's arrest. According to the AG's office, the owners would only remove the mugshots if the person paid a fee, even if the charges were dismissed. This happened even if the suspect was only arrested because of "mistaken identity or law enforcement error." You can read the affidavit here.
If you read a lot of articles about crime, then you're probably already familiar with the site (which is still up as of Friday afternoon). They take mugshots, slap the url multiple times on the image, and post it on the site alongside an excerpt from a news outlet that covered the person's arrest. According to the AG's office, the owners would only remove the mugshots if the person paid a fee, even if the charges were dismissed. This happened even if the suspect was only arrested because of "mistaken identity or law enforcement error." You can read the affidavit here.
I think there's value in the arrest record after the case is dropped or the defendant is found not guilty - but only as an aggregate statistic. If a precinct normally has 30 dropped cases a month and suddenly they spike to 50, something's up and procedures need to be examined. This can be useful but it shouldn't be able to be traced back to the specific person.
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Does this mean Yelp owners will get arrested for their policies that solicit payment to hide bad reviews?
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I won't agree with b0s0z0ku's statement that a not-guilty verdict or dropped case should result in the records being destroyed. There's value to holding onto them if only to tell how often this sort of thing occurs. However, these cases should be released only in aggregate (e.g. "there were 27 dropped cases in Precinct A over the past year") not in detail. Other than that, they should be locked away and regarded as not existing if any future charge is presented or when evaluating a person.
The records of acquittal need to be retained to avoid double jeopardy.
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