Advocates Complain of Background Check Errors

Oct. 13, 2008— -- Ryan Brandt thought his criminal history was behind him. A judge in 2005 allowed him to expunge his record for a 1995 battery conviction.

But when he recently applied to work as a manager of an Arby's restaurant in Mariniette, Wis., he claims in a federal lawsuit, he was denied the job because his expunged record came up on a criminal background check.

Brandt eventually settled for lower paying job. "I was trying to get a better job and move up. I thought it was all behind me," he said of his conviction. "That basically cost me a job."

At least 40 states give people like Brandt the right to effectively erase their criminal past by sealing or expunging some, usually minor, prior criminal convictions.

But massive private electronic databases of criminal records, which are not always up to date, make some of those supposedly secret records widely available to employers and landlords.

Public court records, once protected by what the Supreme Court called the "practical obscurity" of the nation's decentralized justice system, are now digitized and sold to private companies. Some of those companies compile them into databases of millions of public records.

According to government reports and consumer lawsuits, those databases often contain inaccuracies, reporting criminal convictions for people who have never been arrested and records that should have been expunged.

Criminal justice experts say it is common for people to lose jobs because of those inaccuracies. "We're building a system that creates a scarlet letter that can never be removed," said Robert Sykora of the Minnesota Board of Public Defense, which oversees the state's public defenders.

There are no comprehensive statistics on how often the reports turn up inaccurate information. But a review of court records by ABC News found dozens of lawsuits, on behalf of hundreds of people, filed in the last two years against the major criminal records database companies, alleging that background checks contain inaccurate information about criminal convictions.