From Smith v. InformData, LLC, decided Wednesday by Judge Rossie Alston (E.D. Va.):
Plaintiff Harry Smith filed suit for alleged violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act ("FCRA") arising out of an "employment purposed consumer report published by Defendant to non-party Turn Technologies Inc…. who then resold the same to Plaintiff's potential employer, inclusive of criminal records that had been pardoned and expunged years earlier." …
In February of 2020, Plaintiff appeared before the Board of Pardons (for an unidentified jurisdiction, but presumably Delaware) and sought a pardon for convictions that were more than a decade old. Thereafter, the Board of Pardons recommended that Plaintiff be pardoned. On May 26, 2020, then-Governor of Delaware John Carney granted Plaintiff a pardon for all of his convictions.
In July 2020, Plaintiff applied for expungement of his convictions. On March 3, 2021, Plaintiffs petition for expungement was granted pursuant to 11 Del. Code § 4372(e)(1), which provides that, within 60 days of expungement, all criminal records must "be removed from the Court's files." The expungement order further stated that Plaintiff need not disclose that he was arrested, charged, or convicted of the expunged convictions, for any reason except as provided for in 11 Del. Code § 4376(a). That statute provides that it is "unlawful for any person having or acquiring access to an expunged court or law-enforcement agency record to open or review it or to disclose to another person any information from it without an order from the court which ordered the record expungement." …
The court rejected plaintiff's Fair Credit Reporting Act claim:
