Arrest for possession vs. employment and law school apps

^^^ The question is whether the state makes arrest records publicly available in the first place, and whether it's gathered together in a central database that is easy for anyone to access. If I'm not mistaken, some states don't do that.

Welcome to 1984 (23 years later).

Anyway, good luck, and let us know how it works out. You're not the only poster here to be interested in this issue.
 
I still have a felony that shows up for a charge from 1999 in which the state attorney declined to prosecute. On the background check, it lists the case as being dropped. This is in FL.
 
The other thing is that there's a difference between being arrested and charged. You can be arrested, but never charged.

When you're charged, the paperwork gets filed in court, which means it gets made public. Then it's only a question of whether there's an easy way to search for a person's name in a database of the charges filed.
 
I had the opportunity of looking at my background check results when I was hired for my current job. And what do you know, both of my (convictionless) arrests were on it.

edit: I should mention that I wasn't charged either time either.
 
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My Mom used to work in human resources for a college and she showed us a page that the California courts had that allowed searched by name and social security and would turn up everything on a person. There was no login or anything.. I'm really diappointed in myself that I didn't keep a record of it somewhere.

Anyway, I looked up several of my friends and found out stuff about them that they had never told me. Ranging from tickets for obstructed view while driving to all kinds of documents regarding court cases for posession cases including cases that hadn't even finished yet.

My friend who had been arrested for posession and given a court date had records on there about the arrest before he even went to court.

So, obviously it's not that hard to get ahold of that kind of information if you know where to get it. I've tried searching for that page and could never find it again.
 
Kul69 said:
My Mom used to work in human resources for a college and she showed us a page that the California courts had that allowed searched by name and social security and would turn up everything on a person. There was no login or anything.. I'm really diappointed in myself that I didn't keep a record of it somewhere.

Anyway, I looked up several of my friends and found out stuff about them that they had never told me. Ranging from tickets for obstructed view while driving to all kinds of documents regarding court cases for posession cases including cases that hadn't even finished yet.

My friend who had been arrested for posession and given a court date had records on there about the arrest before he even went to court.

So, obviously it's not that hard to get ahold of that kind of information if you know where to get it. I've tried searching for that page and could never find it again.


That sounds like any basic background check website.
 
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