A Baldwin County legal dispute over a state law meant to help people clear old arrest records from their past has instead turned into a constitutional showdown, after a Daphne municipal court case left an online publisher facing criminal charges, a bench warrant and a civil lawsuit — and led him to leave the state rather than turn himself in.
The case centers on a 2014 Alabama expungement law that allows people with certain minor or dismissed criminal charges to have those records sealed. While the law was pitched publicly as a way to give people a second chance after youthful mistakes, it also contains a provision that makes it a Class B misdemeanor to publish or otherwise disclose the contents of a record once it has been expunged, carrying penalties of up to a $500 fine and a year in jail. Legal observers say the publication provision received far less scrutiny than the record-sealing provisions when the bill moved through the Legislature two years ago.
That provision is now being tested in Daphne, where a City Judge ordered a Baldwin County-based online publisher to remove an arrest record he had posted involving a local attorney. The publisher, who runs a website focused on investigative and watchdog reporting, had published a roughly 14-year-old arrest record showing the attorney was arrested in his early twenties on a drug possession charge. The attorney went through a pretrial diversion program at the time and was never convicted, and the record was later expunged under the 2014 law.
According to court proceedings, the publisher was ordered at a hearing last week to take the material off his website, with a follow-up hearing set for August. He says he worked through the night attempting to comply, but technical problems delayed the removal until the following morning. By then, the attorney had filed a new complaint, and the City Judge issued a bench warrant for the publisher’s arrest for failing to comply in time — even though the material was eventually removed. The publisher was ordered to turn himself in the next day.
Rather than surrender, the publisher left Alabama, saying he feared being held in custody indefinitely while the case played out. He is now wanted on the original expungement-related charge as well as contempt of court for not turning himself in, and a separate civil suit has also been filed against him over the same material.
The publisher’s reporting is not limited to the arrest record itself. His site has also included material connecting the attorney’s family to broader claims involving organized crime figures and drug trafficking networks in the region, along with commentary about the attorney’s professional ties. Those ties include a law school clerkship with a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, and the publisher’s site has also included posts about that judge, touching on her rulings and her family’s financial history, including a land inheritance dating back roughly a century that was eventually sold to a hospital for over a million dollars split among several heirs. The publisher took those posts down as well amid the legal pressure, though he maintains the underlying material was factual.
Adding another layer to the dispute, the publisher says a U.S. Marshal contacted him directly and pressed him to remove both sets of posts, and he has shared a recorded phone call he says documents that conversation. Federal marshals are typically tasked with matters such as courthouse security and protecting federal judicial officers, and it remains unclear why a marshal would be involved in what is, on its face, a misdemeanor violation of a state publication law. A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service has not responded to requests for comment on the matter.
Alabama’s expungement statute is not unique in trying to balance privacy for people with old, minor or dismissed charges against the public’s right to know about court proceedings. But First Amendment attorneys note that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that the government cannot bar the publication of truthful information that was lawfully obtained, except in extremely narrow circumstances involving matters like national security. Alabama’s law, by contrast, criminalizes the publication of a document once a court has ordered it expunged, regardless of how the publisher obtained it or whether it was accurate.
Press freedom advocates have pointed to the case as an example of how expungement statutes, when drafted broadly, can end up functioning as prior restraint on legitimate reporting and commentary, even when the person publishing the material is not a conventional news outlet. Because Alabama’s law does not distinguish between traditional newspapers, broadcasters and independent online publishers, any of them could theoretically face the same misdemeanor exposure for reporting on an expunged case.
The Daphne case is believed to be among the first prosecutions brought under the publication provision of the 2014 law, and its outcome could shape how the statute is applied — or challenged — going forward. The next scheduled hearing in the matter is set for August, though it remains unclear whether the publisher, now believed to be out of state, will appear.
Attorneys who follow First Amendment issues in Alabama say the case is likely to draw continued attention regardless of how sympathetic observers find the publisher’s broader body of work, since the constitutional question of prior restraint applies independent of the credibility of any individual piece of reporting. Calls for the Legislature to revisit the expungement law’s publication clause have grown since news of the arrest warrant became public.