Guide
Charges dropped, but the mugshot is still online
This is the most common situation we see, and it is the one where the law is most likely to be on your side. Several states give you a free removal right specifically because the case ended in your favour — with deadlines as short as seven days.
Why a dismissal changes your position
Most state mugshot statutes are written around disposition. A dismissal, an acquittal, or a completed diversion programme is frequently the trigger that converts a polite request into a legal obligation with a clock on it.
Georgia requires a commercial publisher to remove within 30 days of a certified-mail request, without fee, where the case was dismissed or the person acquitted. South Carolina requires removal within 30 days, and where charges were reduced rather than dropped, a free revision instead. Utah — which otherwise permits a capped fee — cuts the deadline to seven days and bars any fee at all where the case was dismissed, the person acquitted, or the record expunged, and describes charging in that situation as theft by extortion. Florida's ten-day, no-fee obligation does not depend on disposition, but a dismissal removes any argument the publisher might make about accuracy.
Missouri operates upstream: if you were arrested and not charged within 30 days, the arrest report becomes a closed record, which is powerful evidence for every request that follows.
What to do, in order
Get the disposition document first. A certified copy of the dismissal or the nolle prosequi is what makes the request work; a description of it is not. Nearly every refusal we see on a valid claim is procedural, not substantive.
Then send the request the way your state's statute requires — registered mail to the registered agent in Florida, certified mail with your name, date of birth, date of arrest and arresting agency in Georgia and South Carolina. The deadline runs from delivery, so keep the receipt.
Then handle the copies. One booking record is typically republished across several aggregators, and a dismissal that clears the first site does nothing for the other six. This is the step people stop before, and it is why records seem to come back.
Where the law will not help
A newspaper that reported the arrest is not a mugshot publisher, and no state statute here compels it to unpublish. Some newsrooms have their own policies for updating or removing coverage of cases that collapsed; that is a request to an editor, and it is worth making.
A record on a government site is a different target again, and increasingly a promising one — courts have begun treating a county's own mugshot lookup as a legal exposure rather than routine transparency.
Use the disposition sheet's word, not yours
Sites publish their accepted grounds as fixed lists, and those lists name specific dispositions rather than the general idea of a case ending. Which means the word you choose decides the outcome before anyone reads your explanation.
The grounds that recur across the sites we checked are expunged, sealed, dismissed, nolle prosequi, no information, record restriction, and not guilty. One large site's form offers a dropdown with four options and nothing else; another accepts six named grounds and no others. A request that says the charges were dropped can be declined by a form that has no such option, while the same case described as a nolle prosequi matches a listed ground exactly.
So pull the disposition sheet before you write anything and use its language. This is the most common avoidable rejection in the whole category, and it costs nothing to avoid.
Common questions
Does a dismissal automatically remove the mugshot?
No. Nothing happens automatically. The dismissal gives you the right to demand removal in several states, and strengthens the request everywhere, but somebody has to make the request.
What if the site ignores my request?
That is what the penalty provisions are for, and they vary sharply — Florida's escalate through injunction to $1,000 and $5,000 per day, Arizona's escalate from $100 to $500 per day the longer refusal continues, South Carolina's are criminal. Our state pages set out each one.
How long does this take?
The statutory windows run from seven to thirty days, and they start when the request is properly delivered. Copies across other sites take longer, because each one is its own request.
Try the free route first
If the page is already down and the search result has not caught up, this is the fix, and it is free. The part almost nobody knows: you must NOT own the page to use it. That is what it is for. It is refused while the text is still on the live page, so wait until the page is genuinely gone.
Open Google’s Refresh Outdated Content tool
Sources
Every claim on this page traces to the sources above, checked on 2026-08-25. Rules in this area change — several of the ones on this page changed in the last three years. If you find something here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
