Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

legalcheek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 368 posts

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

#231

Post by Muromec »

hananova wrote: post #212
itsthecourier wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know some countries that emit a "certificate of no judicial history", even when the citizen has so, if they ended the jail time I think this is wrong, it should be reported entirely at least for 5 years after the fact happened

The jail time is the entire punishment. To allow punishment to continue afterward is to invite recidivism.

Jail time is not always the entire punishment, especially on the enlightened continent, where jail time is used sparingly. Keeping the conviction on record is a thing, because consecutive convictions often carry come with higher punishment. So depending on a crime cathegory, there is X years after which the record no longer counts, but it's not 0.

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

#232

Post by patcon »

My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government.

Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.

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

#233

Post by Muromec »

orthoxerox wrote: post #184
philipwhiuk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The idea that society is required to forget crime is pretty toxic honestly.

The idea that society is required to forgive crime is pretty Christian, though.

that part of Christianity somehow is lost on Americans somehow.

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

#234

Post by Vvector »

londons_explore wrote: post #41
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.

"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.

Are you suggesting that I cannot refuse to hire a bookkeeper that has multiple convictions for embezzlement?

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

#235

Post by flufluflufluffy »

krona wrote: post #175
pjc50 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This database exposed half a million weekend cases which were heard with zero press notification. Many grooming gang trials were heard this way. The database is being deleted weeks before the national inquiry into the grooming gang cover up begins, and the official reason for deleting the data is nonsensical.

The data is publicly available. The data being deleted is the private company’s own copy of it.

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

#236

Post by jonty »

Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation.

Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago:

> HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...

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

#237

Post by reactordev »

neallindsay wrote: post #195
andsoitis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. This made me pause. It seems to me that if something is not meant to inform decision making, then why does a record of it need to persist?

If someone is charged with and found innocent of a crime, you can't just remove that record. If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent. Alternately if they are convicted and served their sentence, they might need to prove that in the future. Sometimes people are unfairly ostracized for their past, but I think a policy of deleting rec…

Or in the case of, down the road, repeating an offense. The judge sees you had an issue in the past, was good for a while, then repeated, suggesting an event or something has happened or that the individual has lost their motivation to stay reformed. Sentencing to time for the crime but then also being able to assist the individual in finding help to get them back on track. We have the systems in place to do this, we just don’t.

Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should.

The only way to have a system like that is to keep records, permanently, but decision making is limited.

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

#238

Post by brabel »

LightBug1 wrote: post #107
koito17 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if made illegal, how does enforcement occur? The United States, at least, is notorious for HR being extremely opaque regarding hiring decisions. Then there's cases like Japan, where not only companies, but also landlords, will make people answer a question like: "have you ever been part of an anti-social organization or committed a crime?" If you don't answer truthfully, that is a legal reason to reject you. If…

Jesus ... that gives me a new perspective on Japan ...

One of the ways they keep crime so low. Being convicted destroys your reputation in a country where reputation is extremely important. Everyone loves saying it would be great to have lower crimes like Japan, but very few would really want the system that achieving that requires.

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

#239

Post by flufluflufluffy »

pjc50 wrote: post #4

This is odd; this is supposed to be public information, isn't it? I suspect it's run into bureaucratic empire-defending rather than a nefarious scheme to conceal cases. Relatedly, there's an extremely good online archive of important cases in the past, but because they disallow crawlers in robots.txt: https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt not many people know about it. Personally I would prefer if all reporting on legal…

It is public information. The private company whose database is being deleted processed the public information into an easier to search and consume dataset

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

jonty wrote: post #236

Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation. Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago: > HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private c…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN