Possessed by the ghost of Lewis Carroll: 'historical fact' vs. 'legal fact'
Erasing History
By BILL KELLER, NYT
One of my favorite coffee-table books is an odd volume called “The Commissar Vanishes,” a portfolio of doctored photographs from Stalin’s Russia. When Stalin purged one of his fellow Bolsheviks, the comrade who fell from favor was duly cropped or airbrushed out of official photographs. “The Commissar Vanishes” juxtaposes the before and after. Here is the party stalwart grinning alongside Lenin in Red Square; and now — poof! — he’s gone. Person, un-person. History, un-history.
For a contemporary take on the subject of un-history, I take you now to a lawsuit scheduled for argument next month in a Connecticut courtroom. The case tests the proposition that in America in the Internet age, there are benign, even humane reasons that sometimes history should be erased.
Connecticut has a law that allows people accused of crimes to expunge the official record if a case is dismissed. Most states have some version of expungement laws, or erasure laws as they are sometimes called. They are intended to let those whose cases have been dropped or overturned get on with their lives, unencumbered by the taint of arrest. Thus under the Connecticut law any person whose record is erased “shall be deemed to have never been arrested” and “may swear so under oath.”
Lorraine Martin, a nurse in Greenwich, was arrested in 2010 with her two grown sons when police raided her home and found a small stash of marijuana, scales and plastic bags. The case against her was tossed out when she agreed to take some drug classes, and the official record was automatically purged. It was, the law seemed to assure her, as if it had never happened.
(More here.)
By BILL KELLER, NYT
One of my favorite coffee-table books is an odd volume called “The Commissar Vanishes,” a portfolio of doctored photographs from Stalin’s Russia. When Stalin purged one of his fellow Bolsheviks, the comrade who fell from favor was duly cropped or airbrushed out of official photographs. “The Commissar Vanishes” juxtaposes the before and after. Here is the party stalwart grinning alongside Lenin in Red Square; and now — poof! — he’s gone. Person, un-person. History, un-history.
For a contemporary take on the subject of un-history, I take you now to a lawsuit scheduled for argument next month in a Connecticut courtroom. The case tests the proposition that in America in the Internet age, there are benign, even humane reasons that sometimes history should be erased.
Connecticut has a law that allows people accused of crimes to expunge the official record if a case is dismissed. Most states have some version of expungement laws, or erasure laws as they are sometimes called. They are intended to let those whose cases have been dropped or overturned get on with their lives, unencumbered by the taint of arrest. Thus under the Connecticut law any person whose record is erased “shall be deemed to have never been arrested” and “may swear so under oath.”
Lorraine Martin, a nurse in Greenwich, was arrested in 2010 with her two grown sons when police raided her home and found a small stash of marijuana, scales and plastic bags. The case against her was tossed out when she agreed to take some drug classes, and the official record was automatically purged. It was, the law seemed to assure her, as if it had never happened.
(More here.)
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