A federal jury could begin deliberations this week to decide whether Bucks County government “willfully” violated federal law when it posted criminal information online of some 67,000 people incarcerated over the years at the county prison in Doylestown.
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| Attorney Jonathan Schub |
If the jury finds in favor of the defendant, and the members of the class-action suit, the same jury will decide whether the county is on the hook for damages that could cost the county millions. A maximum award could cost the county $670 million, but a finding in its favor could allow the county to pay nothing.
Attorneys are expected to give closing arguments Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia in the potentially precedent-setting case that a Sicklerville, New Jersey, man filed against Bucks County in 2012 alleging it violated his civil rights when it included his arrest information and mugshot on a publicly accessible website of Bucks County Corrections inmates.
Jurors will be asked to decide whether Bucks County “willfully” violated the Criminal History Records Information Act, known as CHRIA, when it posted the information for Daryoush Taha, 49, and others in the database known as an inmate lookup search tool.
To date, no court has set a standard for what rises to the level of a “willful” violation with CHRIA, which would trigger a mandatory punitive damages award, U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone wrote in a court opinion in the case.
Bensalem police arrested Taha in 1998 on charges of harassment, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. He was later accepted into a one-year trial diversion probation program for first-time nonviolent offenders, which he completed, and his arrest information was ordered expunged in January 2000.
Eleven years later, Taha alleges that he learned that his arrest information and mugshot appeared on a new searchable electronic database that Bucks County created that listed individuals held or incarcerated at its county jail. After Taha filed his federal civil suit, the county removed all inmate mugshots and most arrest information from the lookup tool in 2013.
The suit originally included multiple defendants including Bensalem Police and Mugshots.com LLC, but they were dropped, leaving only the county and its correctional center as defendants.
The civil case has already secured several critical judgments favoring Taha and class members including that the county violated the CHRIA, when it posted arrest information and mugshots. The statute prohibits counties and county jails from releasing criminal information except to other agencies.
The jury is only determining if the county’s violation was willful, and if so the amount of damages, since the judge already determined it was a violation.
The federal judge overseeing the case also granted the case class action status; more recently, the court ruled that Bucks County violated CHRIA each time it posted information online, rejecting the county’s argument that the posting of the information counted as a single violation.
The ruling on the number of violations was a critical win for the class action case because a CHRIA violation allows for punitive damage awards, which are typically seen as secondary punishment to deter egregious conduct.
The jury can award the punitive penalty — $1,000 to $10,000 per violation — though the court did not award Taha actual damages for the violation because he did not contend that he suffered any economic losses as a result of the arrest information being posted online.
This news organization was unsuccessful in reaching Philadelphia attorney Frank Chernak, who is representing the county in the case, for comment Friday. The county declined comment through its spokesman Larry King.
Philadelphia attorney Jonathan Shub, who represents Taha and the other class members, declined to comment.
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