Guide

Expunged, and still on Google

Checked 2026-08-25

An expungement order binds courts and agencies. It does not reach a private website that copied the record before the order existed. That gap is why people spend thousands on an expungement and find the mugshot still there.

What the order actually does

Expungement clears the official record. The court seals or destroys it, agencies stop reporting it, and in most contexts you may lawfully answer that it did not happen. What it cannot do by itself is reach into a commercial database that scraped the booking log two years earlier. Those companies were never parties to your case.

So the order is not the end of the work. It is the strongest single piece of evidence for the work that follows, and it converts a request into something closer to a demand.

Where the order has real force

Texas is the clearest example: Chapter 109 of the Business and Commerce Code prohibits a covered publisher from publishing criminal record information that has been expunged or made subject to an order of nondisclosure, with a civil penalty of up to $500 per record plus $500 per day for a continuing violation, enforceable by the Attorney General or a prosecuting attorney. That is not a request; it is a violation with a number attached.

Utah expedites removal to seven days and bars any fee where the record was expunged. Georgia's free-removal duty runs on favourable dispositions. Illinois requires errors corrected within five business days of a certified-mail demand, and a listing that omits an expungement is inaccurate.

Attach a certified copy of the order to every request. Sites refuse on procedure far more often than on substance, and "I was expunged" without the document is a procedural refusal waiting to happen.

The search-result layer

Even after the source page is gone, the search result can persist until Google recrawls. Google's own tool now includes a refresh request for pages that have changed or been removed but still show stale content in results — use it, and use it after the source is actually gone rather than before.

And check the copies. An expungement is exactly the kind of event that makes people believe the problem is solved; the aggregator that scraped the record in a different month is unaffected by that belief.

What the courts have actually said

This is settled enough to quote. The Tenth Circuit in Nilson v. Layton City: an expungement order does not privatize criminal activity — it removes the arrest from an individual's criminal record, but the underlying event remains public, and court records and police blotters permanently document it. The Second Circuit in Martin v. Hearst held that an erasure statute does not and cannot undo historical facts or convert once-true facts into falsehoods, and that nothing in it imposes requirements on people working outside courts and law enforcement agencies. The American Bar Association's public guidance says the same in fewer words: expungement orders do not remove records from the press, from Google, or from social media.

The reverse trap catches more people than the forward one. An expungement does not clear the disclosure duty on a bar application, a clearance questionnaire, or many licensing forms — several require you to report sealed and expunged matters anyway, and to attach the expungement order itself as proof.

Common questions

Can a website legally publish an expunged record?

In Texas, a covered publisher may not, and the penalty is up to $500 per record plus $500 per day. Elsewhere it depends on the state — several have free-removal duties triggered by expungement, and some have nothing on point.

Do I have to disclose an expunged record?

That depends entirely on the context, and some licensing and clearance regimes require disclosure even of expunged matters. That is a question for a lawyer in your field, not for us.

Will the mugshot come back after removal?

It can, if a copy elsewhere is re-scraped. That is why the work is finding every copy rather than the first one, and why we re-remove the same URL at no additional cost if it returns.

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.