Martin v. Hearst Corporation

Martin v. Hearst Corporation
Court	United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Full case name	Lorraine Martin v. Hearst Corporation, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc., dba Daily Greenwich, News 12 Interactive, Inc.
Argued	August 18, 2014
Decided	January 28, 2015
Citation(s)	777 F.3d 546, Docket No. 13-3315 (2d Cir. 2015)
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	John M. Walker, Jr., Dennis Jacobs, Richard C. Wesley (2d Cir.)
Keywords
defamation, expungement, right to be forgotten

Lorraine Martin v. Hearst Corporation (2d Cir. 2015) was a defamation case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit protecting online news sources from having to remove or modify a story chronicling a person's arrest if that arrest is later erased from the record by the government using a criminal erasure statute.^[1]

The Second Circuit found that when a news source reports on an arrest, and the government subsequently erases the arrest using a criminal erasure statute, the news stories do not become defamatory, because the historical fact of the arrest remains true. The ruling protected Hearst Corporation's news outlets from having to modify or remove their online articles after plaintiff Lorraine Martin's arrest for drug possession was erased for legal purposes using Connecticut's criminal erasure statute (an expungement law). The case is seen by some as evidence that United States law cannot accommodate a right to be forgotten like the one established in the European Union in May 2014.^[2]