2nd Circuit nixes libel suit over 'scarlet letter' news stories that survived expunged arrest record
Although Lorraine Martin succeeded in making her 2010 marijuana-possession arrest a legal fiction, that doesn’t mean news organizations must expunge their stories about the since-dropped case, an appeals court has ruled.
A Connecticut statute “creates legal fictions, but it does not and cannot undo historical facts or convert once-true facts into falsehoods,” wrote Judge Richard Wesley for a three-judge panel of the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a Wednesday opinion (PDF). “The statute does not render historically accurate news accounts of an arrest tortious merely because the defendant is later deemed as a matter of legal fiction never to have been arrested.”
Martin had argued that Hearst Corp. newspaper stories about the arrest, which can be found on the Internet, are inaccurate, although they were true at the time they were published, because they don’t include the fact that her criminal case was later dropped. However, a federal district judge dismissed the libel suit, and the 2nd Circuit upheld that decision in its Wednesday ruling, according to Courthouse News and the Hollywood Reporter.
The state’s criminal records erasure statute says “any person who shall have been the subject of such an erasure shall be deemed to have never been arrested within the meaning of the general statutes with respect to the proceedings so erased and may so swear under oath.”
Martin’s lawyer, Mark Sherman, told a New York Times (reg. req.) columnist in 2013 that her work prospects were adversely affected by the news stories.
“It’s essentially a scarlet letter,” he said. “She’s become unemployable in spite of the fact that she has no criminal arrest record.”
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “A changing truth: Do online news stories about arrests constitute libel after expungement?”
