Last year, I announced The Oregonian/OregonLive would launch a “clean slate” program that allowed subjects of articles to ask us to review old news about minor crimes published on our website. Today, I want to update readers on that effort.
To recap, we decided that the lasting effect of publicity for relatively minor scrapes with the law can create an unfair and outsized burden on someone trying to find a job or apartment.
Our decision was guided by several factors: Unlike in the past, our archives remain available for many years through search engines; we used to report on minor crimes more often than we currently do and rarely followed up; and society has shifted toward a new approach to helping people rebuild their lives after a criminal conviction.
Several other news organizations launched similar programs, notably our sister site Cleveland.com. The shift in society also has led to “ban the box” laws, which prohibit prospective employers from asking about criminal convictions early in the hiring process.
Because communities of color are disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system, there is a racial justice component as well. The lingering existence of a mugshot online following an arrest for a minor crime can become an intractable impediment to gainful employment or housing for people who already face discrimination.
Since we launched the review system in mid-2021, our internal committee of reporters and editors has resolved several dozen requests. Their decisions are based on news judgment, common sense and basic fairness.
We have five main options when requests come in through our online form: leave things as is; remove a photograph, usually a jail booking mugshot; remove a name; ask Google to de-index the article, which makes it harder to find on OregonLive; or take an article down altogether.
We generally won’t consider removing names or articles in the case of violent crimes, sex crimes or crimes against children. We also won’t remove names or stories in cases of public corruption or, at our discretion, in cases where people hold a position of public trust, such as doctors, police officers and schoolteachers.
If someone got a court order to set aside a conviction, commonly referred to as expungement, we would weigh that as a factor but would not automatically remove the name or article.
Politics and education editor Betsy Hammond helps lead the reviews with public safety editor Margaret Haberman. “Our committee members take this assignment seriously and often spend a long, thoughtful discussion weighing the trade-offs of taking stories down versus keeping them up,” Hammond said.
The committee meets periodically, and Haberman said the review can be time-consuming. “Many of the requests have involved reporting, reading court records to check on the outcomes, calling people, verifying claims, which has caused delays in turnaround time,” she said.
Here are a few requests and how the committee handled them:
A young father addicted to drugs stole some outdoor furniture to feed his addiction in 2003. He moved out of state for a decade before realizing he had an arrest warrant pending. He turned himself in and did his time. Now addiction free, he asked that we remove the article and we did.
A woman with mental illness who had stopped taking her medication asked that we remove a 2017 article about an altercation with police. “I take full responsibility for my actions that day and have taken steps to rectify and atone for what transpired,” she wrote. “Today I can proudly say that I have landed back on my feet and was able to procure a stable job.” We removed it.
The easiest issue that comes to the newsroom involves jail booking photos. We stopped publishing such photos for routine cases some time ago, and subsequently Oregon law changed to strictly limit the public release of such photos by law enforcement.
Such photos are a great example of what we are trying to address: a snapshot of someone’s worst moment, often related to a minor crime, which might end up dismissed, pleaded down or sealed. Yet the demeaning photograph lives on and on and on, just one keyboard search away.
We’re very likely to agree to remove booking photographs, given our current practice of not using them unless, say, police release a photo in hopes of apprehending a fugitive.
“The process also shows again and again that many of the requests deal with the types of stories we no longer do -- because of their minor nature, because we no longer cover the metro area at that level of detail in all things and because we’ve changed how we cover public safety and handle photos,” Haberman said.
Here is the form to request a review
Hammond said some requests were surprising. “We expected people accused of convicted of low-level crimes to request journalistic clemency after a period of years, and they have. But other requests have been quite different.”
For instance, The Oregonian used to highlight top students at metro area high schools, writing profiles of them for a feature called Academic Achievers. We receive occasional requests to remove that information due to privacy concerns, problems with stalkers or the wish that the date of their high school graduation not be so public.
In another case, a trans person reached out to have a former name removed. “Deadnaming” refers to the use of a name a trans or nonbinary person previously used, such as their birth name. We updated the name.
In another, the widow of a man who died in an accident years ago asked that her young children’s names be removed from the article. We agreed to do so.
Since the launch of our clean slate program, we haven’t agreed to every request. We declined to remove an article about a man who stabbed his wife. We did agree, in a separate case, to remove the names of children, now grown, mentioned in an article about a man convicted of killing their mother.
We said no to a local businessman who had been sentenced to prison for dodging taxes and denied another person’s request to remove an article about a sex abuse conviction involving a minor.
We expect the program will continue to evolve as we receive more requests, but we’re pleased with results so far.
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