TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie on Friday signed a new law requiring prosecutors in New Jersey to take down or update public statements about people who have been acquitted of crimes.
The bill’s sponsors hailed its passage as a way to clean up the online reputations of those found not guilty, but the measure also raises concerns among advocates of government transparency, who say it could keep the public in the dark about cases prosecutors lose.
It’s a matter of public record when anyone is charged with a crime, but in an age newspaper layoffs the cases that get the most attention are the ones authorities publicly tout in press releases.
Those public statements can sometimes mean arrests and indictments get splashy media coverage even if a case falls apart at trial.
And with most of the state’s law enforcement agencies now running their own websites and social media pages, the statements detailing charges against an individual can top the results for people’s names in search engines like Google.
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Assemblyman Craig Coughlin (D-Middlesex), one of the sponsors, said Friday that “while charges can be dismissed and people acquitted, the Internet is forever.”
The new law (A1945) requires that any time a person is found not guilty, the state’s attorney general and county prosecutors must remove from their websites “any press release or other published information that includes the individual’s name, or inform the public on the website that the person was acquitted of the charges or that the charges were dismissed.”
The language of the statute gives prosecutors the option of either amending their existing public statements or taking them down entirely.
Paul Loriquet, a spokesman for Attorney General Christopher Porrino, said Friday his office had not yet decided what it would do in such cases.
“The law provides us options, and we’ll obviously comply with the statutory requirement,” he said.
Law enforcement agencies already remove public statements from their websites by court order when a person is granted an expungement of their records, but such cases are rare.
The new law would expand the practice to anyone who is acquitted or has the charges against them dropped, though it would not apply to those convicted of lesser charges than the ones initial brought against them.
Walter Leurs, the vice president of the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government, said it makes sense for prosecutors to disclose when somebody they’ve publicly accused of wrongdoing has been found not guilty.
But he said it was wrong to allow law enforcement to quietly delete public statements they’ve made in big cases.
“There is a public interest in knowing who’s been arrested and indicted but not convicted,” Leurs said. “It’s not the end of the world, but it makes the operations of government less transparent.”
Removing public statements from government websites does not erase the digital trail of a criminal case, of course. News organizations that cover trials simply report a not guilty verdict instead of zapping all trace of the charges from the web.
The new law also requires prosecutors produce a letter whenever a person is found not guilty or charges are dropped certifying the status of the case. The requirement is meant to allow those who have been cleared of wrongdoing to prove as much to potential employers and others who might be concerned by the charges.
“This change would at least bring a modicum of closure to the innocent to help them move on and clear their name,” said Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D-Passaic), another sponsor.
S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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