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Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

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Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#131

Post by tw04 »

londons_explore wrote: post #6

Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire... Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs. Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever. We s…

The idea that an individual can look up and case they want is the same thing as a bot being able to scrape and archive an entire dataset forever is just silly.

One individual could spend their entire life going through one by one recording cases and never get through the whole dataset. A bot farm could sift through it in an hour. They are not the same thing.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#132

Post by contravariant »

FunHearing3443 wrote: post #57
londons_explore wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible. Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history. Just like it is currently illegal to discriminate based on race or religion. That data should not be illegal to know, but illegal to use to make most decisions relating to that person.

Curious, why should conviction history not be a factor? I could see the argument that previous convictions could indicate a lack of commitment to no longer committing crimes.

The short answer is that it's up to a judge to decide that, up to the law what it's based on and up to the people what the law is.

Sure there is still some leeway between only letting a judge decide the punishment and full on mob rule, but it's not a slippery slope fallacy when the slope is actually slippy.

It's fairly easy to abuse the leeway to discriminate to exclude political dissidents for instance.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#133

Post by macintux »

piperswe wrote: post #126
mschuster91 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc. I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at l…

The UK has common law: the outcomes of previous court cases and the arguments therein determine what the law is. It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.

It should be possible to leverage previous case law without PII.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#134

Post by 9x39 »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
cs02rm0 wrote: post #5

The minister who set this up claims this is a cover up: https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762 https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/202129530101792376...

Anyone banging on about coverups of crime due to immigrants should get immediately put in the bad faith argument bin, even if they were a Minister.

Actually that’s what data and the preponderance of victims allege: an intersection of immigration and policing which interlocked to systematically deprioritize the investigation into abuse of working-class white girls by an over represented ethnic group.

In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of “over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men”.

It’s unfortunate to watch people and entire countries twist themselves in logic pretzels to avoid ever suggesting that immigration has no ills, and we’re just being polite here about it.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/17/what-is-the-casey-r...

https://celina101.substack.com/p/the-uks-rape-gang-inquiry

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#135

Post by noirscape »

piperswe wrote: post #126
mschuster91 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc. I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at l…

The UK has common law: the outcomes of previous court cases and the arguments therein determine what the law is. It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.

It should be possible to redact names from cases for that purpose.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#136

Post by fmbb »

piperswe wrote: post #126
mschuster91 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc. I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at l…

The UK has common law: the outcomes of previous court cases and the arguments therein determine what the law is. It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.

That can be solved by migrating to a sensible legal system instead.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#137

Post by yxhuvud »

whizzter wrote: post #21
londons_explore wrote: post #6

Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire... Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs. Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever. We s…

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

What we do here in sweden is that you can ask the courts for any court document (unless it is confidential for some reason).

But the courts are allowed to do it conditionally, so a common condition if you ask for a lot of cases is to condition it to redact any PII before making the data searchable. Having the effect that people that actually care and know what to look for, can find information. But you can't randomly just search for someone and see what you get.

There is also a second registry separate from the courts that used to keep track of people that have been convicted during the last n years that is used for backgrounds checks etc.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#138

Post by yxhuvud »

piperswe wrote: post #126
mschuster91 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc. I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at l…

The UK has common law: the outcomes of previous court cases and the arguments therein determine what the law is. It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.

There are middle grounds - for example you could redact any PII before publishing it.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#140

Post by whatsupdog »

reactordev wrote: post #72
whizzter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

>”Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks.” 1000x this. It’s one thing to have a felony for manslaughter. It’s another to have a felony for drug possession. In either case, if enough time has passed, and they have shown that they are reformed (long employment, life events, etc) then I think it should be removed from consideration. Not expunge…

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