CHICAGO — Peter Gabiola thought he was on the right track in 2013. He was out of prison and had been off parole for retail theft for more than a year when he started a new job with a sales and marketing firm in suburban Chicago.
But about an hour after he started, someone at the business Googled his name and saw that he was listed as being on parole. The company fired him immediately, he said.
The Illinois Department of Corrections had removed his records from its website. Commercial website Mugshots.com, however, still featured the information.
After having two more job offers rescinded, Gabiola typed his name into Google himself, saw his page on Mugshots.com, and contacted another site, Unpublisharrest.com, to try to get it taken down. He said the site, which offers its service only for Mugshots.com, told him it would cost $15,000 to attempt to scrub the information — with no guarantee that his profile would be removed.
Decades ago, booking photos — taken after someone is accused of, though not necessarily found guilty of, a crime — had a shelf life, remaining available only if someone kept a newspaper clipping or was willing to visit the public library to scroll through microfilm.
But in the internet age, mug shots culled from public law enforcement endure on the web. The sites argue that people have the right to know whether, say, their son’s baseball coach has been arrested. Mugshots.com says it’s merely republishing arrest information from publicly available government records, so the First Amendment immunizes it from liability.
However, the growing business of charging consumers money to wipe the slate clean is drawing scrutiny across the country.
Illinois and some other states prohibit companies that publish mug shots from soliciting or accepting fees to remove or correct information about criminal records, equating that business model to extortion. Some credit card companies have policies prohibiting the use of their cards on mug shot removal sites.
A cottage industry of reputation-management websites has sprung up, offering comprehensive removal services so people whose mug shots are published don’t have to go through the time-consuming and expensive process of contacting each site individually to get them removed.
Gabiola is a lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit seeking class-action status against Mugshots.com. The lawsuit alleges the site posts incomplete records so, in turn, Unpublisharrest.com, which the suit claims is a sister site, can solicit “takedown” fees from people desperate for a more wholesome digital footprint.
The lawsuit, filed last year, seeks $1,000 for each class member, plus punitive damages, and aims to force Mugshots.com to remove class members’ photos. It seeks to represent, among others, anyone from Illinois whose information has been published on the site since Nov. 21, 2011, and anyone from other states whose information has been published since Nov. 21, 2012.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has intervened in Gabiola’s case against Mugshots.com, saying the state “has a substantial interest in protecting citizens against financial exploitation” that “preys upon the stigma associated with being arrested, convicted or imprisoned.”
Mugshots.com and Unpublisharrest.com “used photographs from the most humiliating moments in people’s lives to shake them down for money,” Madigan’s office said in a November court filing, characterizing Mugshots.com’s business model as an “extortionate practice” that a 2014 state law prohibits and the First Amendment doesn’t protect.
“They run a commercial enterprise built to obtain money from people whose notoriety consists solely of having a criminal record,” the attorney general’s office said in a court filing.
Mug shot websites are on the radars of other states as well.
At least seven states have mug shot-related legislation pending, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislative efforts. Florida has introduced legislation similar to the Illinois law, though past Sunshine State efforts have failed.
Website critics say the industry can undermine former inmates’ job prospects, particularly at a time when a widening swath of the public backs reforms to make it easier for former prisoners to find work as a path to rehabilitation.
But First Amendment rights for even unpopular speakers must be protected, a lawyer for Mugshots.com said.
“These are perilous times for the First Amendment,” said David Ferrucci, a lawyer representing Mugshots.com. “We need to defend everybody’s First Amendment rights.”
Like Madigan, the lawyers who filed the lawsuit against Mugshots.com aren’t convinced by the First Amendment argument.
“Freedom of the press does not include the right to use incorrect or wrong information to profit off of the worst moment of another person’s life,” said Stuart Clarke, an attorney with Chicago law firm Berton N. Ring. “The First Amendment is not a blanket protection for everything you do.”
Gabiola, 53, who no longer lives in the Chicago area, said in a recent interview that it has been difficult for him to find a job and housing because Mugshots.com incorrectly still shows him as being on parole.
He said he just lost a job he held for four months, supervising crews that clean rail cars holding chemicals. When he was being considered for the job, he was asked whether he had ever been convicted of a felony, confirmed that he had, and still got the job, he said. His boss, however, recently Googled him and saw his inaccurate listing on Mugshots.com.
20 people
Separate from the lawsuit against Mugshots.com, Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University’s law school is trying to get the names of almost 20 exonerated people off of mug shot websites, said Samuel Tenenbaum, clinical associate professor of law.
Among them is Terrill Swift, who spent 15 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.
Swift, 39, said it’s a “bad reminder” for his photo to still be on Mugshots.comfive years later. The site has photos of Swift, who was wrongly convicted of rape and murder, though it also displays a video of him after he was exonerated and lists links to related stories.
