By Chris Quinn, President and Editor, Advance Ohio/cleveland.com
We've been talking for several years in our newsroom about the right to be forgotten - the idea that people should not have to spend their lifetimes answering for mistakes they made or minor crimes they committed many years earlier.
Not a week goes by anymore, it seems, that several of us in the newsroom don't hear from people who are blocked from improving their lives by the prominence of cleveland.com stories about their mistakes in Google searches of their names. They don't get jobs, or their children find the content, or new friends see it and make judgments.
I started asking the question in columns a few years ago: How long should someone have to pay for a mistake?
It's time to give you our answer.
We're going to start a process through which people can ask to have their names removed from old stories about minor crimes they committed. And because we don't believe we are in a position to judge which people are deserving, we will rely on a longstanding court process that people use to clear their records: expungement.
People who have committed non-violent crimes who successfully petition the courts to permanently delete all records of their criminal cases will be able to send us a request, along with proof of the expungement, and in most cases, we will remove their names from the stories about them on cleveland.com. Google searches of their names will stop finding those stories.
