PENNSYLVANIA--In an attempt to expunge information about criminal
charges relating to five local defendants, two Centre County judges signed
orders commanding two newspapers to delete archived stories about the
defendants.
Pennsylvania State University's student-run newspaper, The Daily
Collegian, and The Centre Daily Times received orders from Judge
Bradley P. Lunsford and Judge Thomas King Kistler to remove the information
relating to the defendants' charges from their online archives. However,
today Lunsford signed an order vacating the provision involving the CDT and
The Daily Collegian. Kistler's order still remains in place.
Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Collegian, Elizabeth Murphy, said a
newspaper is fulfilling its responsibility when it reports the facts as they
happen. In these cases, the charges were brought lawfully and the newspaper
reported them correctly, she said.
"In my opinion, The Daily Collegian is a record of history as
it happens," Murphy said. "It is not a record of the court,
it's not a government entity. We're here to report the news that
happens day in and day out, and that's my bottom line."
The five defendants either pled guilty to criminal charges ranging from
aggravated indecent assault to possession of marijuana, or completed pretrial
diversion programs that resulted in no finding of guilt.
Bob Heisse,
executive editor of the CDT, said it is highly unusual for an expungement order
to be directed to two publications and that the only time his publication
removes information from its website is if a story is factually incorrect.
"This is a court order that basically wants the entire history of the
crime, since they completed their time, to disappear from the world," he
said. "And that's not the way you do things. Even if we did take
this down from our website and The Daily Collegian took it down,
it's still out there and going to be found. The clients are not going to
accomplish their goal here."
Adam Goldstein, attorney advocate for the Student Press Law Center, said
that expungement only keeps the government from making information about a crime
known -- it does not change the facts and it does not require a newspaper to
change its history.
"Expungement, at its core, is legal fiction," Goldstein said.
"It is a legal way of pretending something didn't happen that
happened. It doesn't mean you didn't do it."
The articles remain in the archives of both newspapers as they await
Kistler's decision. State College defense attorney Joe Amendola
represented the five defendants on the orders. Amendola did not return calls by
press time.
"It's troubling that this attorney and his clients can't
think about personal responsibility and accountability," Heisse said.
"There are also a lot of people who don't seem to value the freedom
of the First Amendment. So you put those two together, and you can see how these
kinds of requests can come in."
By Sommer Ingram, SPLC staff writer
