McBride said over the last 20 years, she's been let go from several jobs without being given a reason why. She told FOX 25, now, it all makes sense.
"This is why... because when they ran my criminal background check, all they're seeing is those two words: felony embezzlement," McBride said.
If she can prove that, I'm wondering if anyone can be held liable for damages?
Discrimination of criminal record is covered under eeoc title 7. She can only be fired for any reason as long as there is no memo or background check paper trail that a criminal history is the reason; or notified if criminal history was the reason and it was a reasonable business risk (which felony embezzlement qualifies for) for the employer
> The EEOC enforces Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Having a criminal record is not listed as a protected basis in Title VII. Therefore, whether a covered employer's reliance on a criminal record to deny employment violates Title VII depends on whether it is part of a claim of employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
It's not a legitimate charge - she was never served notice, and so was never able to answer it. That the state didn't pursue it any further for twenty years demonstrates that they didn't consider it a real thing either.
Well, I asked if _anybody_ had liability. Like the store that (perhaps) filed the charges without determining for sure if she had rented that title and/or was given the opportunity listed in their (presumed) terms to replace it. I know the business is no longer in existence, but did a business file the criminal complaint, or did a person?
I'm surprised no one else in response has brought up notification requirements for background checks:
"...if the employer thinks it might not hire or retain you because of something in the report, it must give you a copy of the report and a 'notice of rights' that tells you how to contact the company that made the report." -- https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/background-checks-what-jo...
In their defence, if there was no possibility of serious consequences, people would have kept tapes all the time and the store would've gone bust well before the internet killed them.
The real issue here is that she apparently didn't even make the rental herself or know it was being done in her name, and that the store or the authorities didn't bring it to her attention and allow her to sort it out at the time.
The real issue, in my mind, is that she had an outstanding charge for felony embezzlement that was reported in background checks but never scheduled for a court date. The government basically hamstrung her economic marketability for 22 years without giving her so much as a summons and a chance to clear her name in court.
Don't get silently accused of a crime that's the result of someone else's actions, unless you're prepared to accept years of unexplained personal losses?
> McBride said over the last 20 years, she's been let go from several jobs without being given a reason why. She told FOX 25, now, it all makes sense.
> On Wednesday, the DA's office said after reviewing McBride's case, they've decided to dismiss it.
I’m surprises the DA doesn’t regularly review these cases. The shop closed in 2008. Even if they wanted to pursue it, wouldn’t it be beyond the statute of limitations? Yet it haunted her for decades. What a sham.
> Even if they wanted to pursue it, wouldn’t it be beyond the statute of limitations?
Probably not, because the charges were filed timely in March of 2000 and an arrest warrant issued. She may have legally been a fugitive from justice until the DA dismissed the charges, which would toll the statute of limitations.
> On Wednesday, the DA's office said after reviewing McBride's case, they've decided to dismiss it.
I feel like she's owed damages, not just dismissal.
What motivates a DA to charge someone with a felony over a VHS tape?
A similar situation is when DAs stack on extra charges for a crime. The addon charges almost never make sense to the actual crime too, it always reads more like a gotcha. It turns what should be a Class C misdemeanor into a Class A, extraordinary fines, and jail time.
Stories like this are infuriating. DA should be required to pay for 20 years of lost invested wages and missed career progression opportunities, alongside a hefty premium for the emotional distress caused by this issue.
The lack of accountability of public offices towards citizens is problematic. I think is a general apathy in government jobs. It doesn’t matter how incompetent you are, and how many people you hurt - you’ll never go “out of business,” tax payers will pay for your mistakes, and you won’t be held responsible for the impact of your actions. So why even try?
There ought to be some feedback loop that forces the public sector to improve itself.
Setting expectations of "don't like it? Well quit your job, give up 12 mo of your life to campaign and fix it yourself!" is not healthy for our society.
And yet, this is how our system works. We all need to participate and realize that politics is not a career -- it is part of living in such a system, and a part of our responsibility as citizens. The only way we are going to fix things is if we fix it ourselves.
I have tried in the past as well. Political apathy is a very real, very dangerous vulnerability in our system of government, and is being exploited all the time.
> The only way we are going to fix things is if we fix it ourselves.
The word "we" is pulling a lot of weight in that statement. All politics suffers a free rider problem. We'll fix it if we fix it, sure, but I don't have to be part of that.
Pressuring your representatives to do something about it, and helping others get mad about it too, and encouraging them to encourage their representatives likewise, is probably the most bottom-up response possible. It can do enormous good, but of course can also go nowhere.
It seems a fatal flaw of a system of government where my liberty might be at stake merely due to apathy of the citizenry. And it seems so much easier to excite the passions of a mob, than to engage the rational capacity of your fellow countrymen.
Government was created by man. It's a good idea that where we can improve them mechanically, we should strive to do so. Same as is done for everything else created by man.
You can say the same about massive corporations as well, and every other day we hear about someone banned from FAANG companies and losing their livelihoods without any recourse other than trying to raise a stink on social media.
And yet, from a customer service experience point of view alone, FAANG companies provide leagues better customer service than any government-provided service. It's not even comparable. Try to get anything done publicly versus privately and it becomes clear why people pay for private solutions.
ahem what is the lowest level of misdemeanor in the United States Of America? For those who do not know it's class A misdemeanor which actually means a felony in most states, not the C.
It is different for every state. My state has a class of offense below misdemeanor, petty misdemeanor. Petty misdemeanors are not considered crimes in my state, the max penalty is a $300 fine.
We also have a special class of speeding ticket for a dumb “parkway” freeway that rich white people lobbied for and received a 45 mph speed limit by state constitutional amendment. Any ticket in this zone for speeding between 45-55 mph is a simple $100 fine that is not even recorded or reported to insurance. This means the speed limit is effectively 55 mph, and an easy way around the constitutional amendment.
This freeway is I35E between downtown St Paul, MN and Mendota Heights, MN.
In Texas a class C is the lowest level of misdemeanor, and A is the highest misdemeanor. So a speeding ticket is the lowest level of crime you can commit.
In many (most?) states, basic speeding tickets aren't actually criminal charges, rather some sort of administrative thing. Hence seeing a magistrate instead of a judge.
Speeding can kill other people. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to be some kind of crime? Just like shooting bullets in the air. Probably won’t, but has potential.
Speeding some amount over the speed limit, driving recklessly in other ways, etc. can be a crime. 75mph in a 65mph zone generally isn't. (There's a lot of technical language around this but, as a practical matter, minor speeding offenses result only in a fine.)
Driving while not speeding can also kill people, so that isn't much of an indicator. Every state has penalties to discourage speeding, just not criminal ones for basic speeding. Given that standard road customs are 90% of traffic going at least 5mph over for everywhere but the PNW, I'd say that not making it so that most everyone is criminal is the right call.
Before you speak to the judge you speak to the prosecutor who can decide to add to the base fine of $173 + $25 court fee even if you don't go to court and it is at their discretion to increase the fine. A prosecutor involved for a speeding ticket no matter if you are going 5 over or 15 over is insane.
It’s almost as if the justice system is designed to protect the owners of capital... same reason you can go to jail for shoplifting but not wage theft.
Theft of any kind generally requires intent to convict. The way laws are written is generally pretty fair because anyone can go review the laws (except secret law). So that's not how the oligarchs protect themselves for the most part. They use selective enforcement instead, à la Jeffery Epstein/Les Wexner.
Whole aspect that the media in question she rented out was a children TV show. So for her to be XXX crimed is certainly some grounds to explore for damages.
Imagine if kids in later life had to live with the a sense of guilt knowing that their parent could be in jail because the forgot to return a video tape they wanted to watch. Would make a now adult turn a whole childhood into latent anxiety worries and were does it end.
Usually the value of the property determines whether a property crime is a misdemeanor or felony. Anyone happen to know what the dividing line was in Oklahoma back then?
A VHS tape could quite well be a lot more expensive than you would expect. If the studio expected that a tape would be mostly rented by consumers rather than bought by consumers they would often price it very high.
Does charging someone with a crime, doing nothing about it for 20 years, and not even telling them, actually help a DA? Shouldn't the number of filed charges sitting idle count against them, if anything? It would seem like evidence that the DA is, so to speak, all talk and no action.
This is one of the most awful things of the current state justice systems around the world: persecution of victimless and minor crimes.
In the came of victimless crimes, well, just get rid of it!
In the case of minor crimes, reparation should be a priority, instead of punishing the actors. It's even better not to persecute than waste a lot of resources in a case (what would be completely inadmissible if we were talking about private justice).
Do you honestly think this will ever lead to a prosecution with significant jail time rather than the news being spectacular as always?
The worst that will happen in this case is the lawyers coming to an agreement that the suspect will pay the late fee and the case be dropped as the defence can surely convince the prosecution that wasting money of this is in no one's interest.
As for victim-less crimes, they exist because despite most people chanting that they do not want them, they in fact do want them, but simply are convinced there is an actual victim in the cases where they want them.
Read the article. This woman says that she was dismissed from multiple jobs over the last 20 years without explanation. Her charge was felony embezzlement, so I don't blame the employers for being freaked out when they saw it. It's on the DA for filing this charge for something so stupid.
She doesn't have to be prosecuted to be persecuted.
>>This woman says that she was dismissed from multiple jobs over the last 20 years without explanation.
Surely.....even such a barbaric country as United States has at least some absolute minimum of protection against unfair dismissal? The whole at will employment alone is insane, but even with it, surely she could sue for unfair dismissal if she wasn't told why she's being let go?
At will means you can be dismissed for "any" reason or no reason; where discrimination against protected classes or other illegal reasons are not acceptable "any" reasons. Under this regime, mosy employers usually tell you you're dismissed for no reason, because it's easier.
When I was subject to background checks in California in this century, there was a checkbox on the form to get a copy of the results, but I'm not sure if that's a federal or state requirement. I don't think there was a checkbox for the results when I got fingerprinted for a school district job in the 90s though. If that was available for the person in the article, they still might not have been able to keep their job, but they'd have been able to clean it up sooner.
> Under this regime, mosy employers usually tell you you're dismissed for no reason, because it's easier.
Most employers will thoroughly document and disclose the reasons (possibility pretextual) for dismissal (often through an extended heavily-documented process like a PIP unless they have or can manufacture an acute reason/pretext) because, one, they are going to use it in court if you claim an impermissible reason, and, two, you knowing that they have something set up to use discourages you from taking them to court in the first place.
Although in a case where they have a ironclad reason and little fear of a lawsuit, but fear of retribution about the basis of the dismissal, that might be different.
I grew up fairly poor, poor people routinely go to jail and pay huge fines for minor infractions that someone with power would never be charged with due to access to legal protections the poor can’t afford.
One example, a childhood friend of mine got a $75 parking ticket that he was not aware of, by the time he found out it was now $250 due to late fees and the state revoked his car registration. Unknown to him, he’s pulled over on the way to work and now gets slapped with another $200 for driving an unregistered vehicle. It was the end of the month, he didn’t have $500 to pay the fines and had to drive to work or lose his job. Pulled over again, this time license revoked and the fees are over $1000 and growing every month he could not pay. A warrant was eventually issued for his arrest, resulting in more fees accrued for the arrest and the interest of his unpaid fees while he was in jail.
Ask any poor person and they can tell you this exact same story - it’s not uncommon at all and in my opinion an evil practice intended to exploit the poor because they can’t resist it.
>lawyers coming to an agreement
Ha ha, I’m sure the person struggling to stay afloat can afford a lawyer.
> One example, a childhood friend of mine got a $75 parking ticket that he was not aware of, by the time he found out it was now $250 due to late fees and the state revoked his car registration. Unknown to him, he’s pulled over on the way to work and now gets slapped with another $200 for driving an unregistered vehicle. It was the end of the month, he didn’t have $500 to pay the fines and had to drive to work or lose his job. Pulled over again, this time license revoked and the fees are over $1000 and growing every month he could not pay. A warrant was eventually issued for his arrest, resulting in more fees accrued for the arrest and the interest of his unpaid fees while he was in jail.
So all these things happened and it was all during this unknown to him that it happened?
How does one have one's driver's licence revoked without being informed thereof?
This more so reads as though he did not properly read the notices he received from the government.
> Ha ha, I’m sure the person struggling to stay afloat can afford a lawyer.
That is why lawyers are appointed to the indigent in criminal cases.
> How does one have one's driver's licence revoked without being informed thereof?
> That is why lawyers are appointed to the indigent in criminal cases.
Are you speaking from direct experience with any of this? If not, please stop repeating plesant fictions of how the system claims to operate.
I have a friend whose license got suspended with no notice, until they were pulled over and their car was towed. The state insists that having sent "notice" by first class mail (with no guarantee of delivery) is good enough, even though certified mail is the minimum for legal process.
I also have another friend that had only a few hundred dollars to their name, was arrested and charged with a felony, and was laughed at when asking to continue with the public defender after the arraignment. The system will readily give you representation so you can be formally charged, after that you're on your own. They had to end up borrowing cash for bail and ongoing representation.
That doesn't even touch upon the injustice of being wrongfully arrested, acquitted, but still having to pay for the legal circus and missed work. Actual reality is much different than the narratives held by people that haven't ever had to suffer the system.
In the US, criminal defense lawyers are only appointed after you have been charged with a criminal offense and are awaiting trial, which only happens after you have been put in jail. Negotiating a parking violation would require private counsel which easily costs more than the amount of the fine. As for the failure to inform, state agencies often have old addresses on record. Some people do try to avoid parking tickets by pretending to not get the notice, but even when that happens this spiral of duchbagery is bull.
Things are readily possible in many ways. What if you don’t have a permanent home/address or consistent access to the internet? It is very easy to miss notices while trying to be on top of things.
—
Lawyers and being appointed don’t work that way. Why would you be appointed a lawyer for non criminal activities?
I don't know if you're from the USA (based on your username), but here government is very inefficient at the state/county/town levels where these sorts of things play out.
Maybe the department that issues tickets in your town doesn't have modern internet connected systems, so they only send notices by mail. If they have the wrong address in their systems for whatever reason (multiple legacy computer systems that don't talk to each other, happens all the time), you won't get the notice but you'll still be held responsible.
It's entirely plausible in cases like these that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing - the ticket is generated, various due dates are set and the paper notices are dispatched, but there's no system to verify if the notices are delivered. Instead, the due dates pass without response and the system generates more fees, more notices, more due dates, until the above scenario reaches its conclusion where a warrant for arrest is issued and makes its way into the police computer systems. In many places in the USA, there's no built-in feedback for the ticket-issuing authorities to ensure that notices were actually received until the police get involved with a warrant. The notices are just fired off, the government says it's the citizen's responsibility no matter what, and they wash their hands of the consequences.
Additionally, in some places traffic tickets in particular have their own separate mini-justice system called "traffic court" or similar, and different rules apply - like no court-appointed lawyers because it's not technically a crime, no juries or even a "real" judge (just a magistrate or administrator), and so on.
It also varies wildly by state and town. It's hard to talk about governance in the USA in general terms because it is so highly federated. For all the power and visibility of the federal government, state and local authorities wield enormous influence over the lives of their citizens. In some ways, the USA is closer in structure to the EU than a single unified country.
In many ways, interacting with government and the justice system in the USA is incredibly byzantine, verging on kafka-esque. If you search around, you will find an endless series of stories of people who commit some minor infraction and are subsequently lost in the labyrinth of government, sometimes even destroying their lives and livelihoods in the process.
The charge on her record was felony embezzlement, which would totally freak me out if I saw it on a background check for an employee. Yes, maybe they could have asked her about it, but from a legal perspective it's safer for them to just dismiss her without explanation. That's not their fault, that's the way that the system is set up.
Understood. However, that was not what I meant. What I was thinking was in terms of the culture and how decisions like this might look to peers, supervisors, etc. I might guess that going easy on people might be looked down upon, and that the usual fear is being blamed for the person that could have been prosecuted, but wasn't, and then did something bad. "lenient prosecutors" vs "tough prosecutors"
It feels like they're dropping the charge because there's no reasonable prospect of a conviction. After twenty years all the employees, and records, for the video shop have gone. There's no evidence.
This does make me wonder how many other similar cases are floating around.
The thing I don’t understand is why she was never formally charged. How do they go 20 years and never let her know in any way she’s charged with a felony. I could understand if it was a parking ticket, but not a felony.
> Why would her record even need clearing if she was not convicted of anything.
Charges and arrests are recorded even without convictions, and are public records. They aren’t legally punishments (though people may make adverse decisions based on them) so they neither require conviction nor automatically disappear without one.
Interesting. That seems like a flaw in background checks. I could imagine it being useful if someone was charged a few months ago and awaiting trial, but in this case it certainly seems unfair.
She has an eeoc title 7 case unless her employers (that terminated her because of a record of charges) can say that they feared the charges directly impacted her possibilty of doing the job.
Being a current fugitive on a felony charge creates reasonable fear of direct impact on the possibility of doing any job, so that’s a pretty easy bar for the potential defendants. Now that its a record of charges that have bee dismissed it would be a different story with future potential employers, of course.
Wow... That TrustArc cookie preferences thing on their site sure is a piece of work. It takes 30+ seconds to completely load such that you can alter the preferences (or you can click allow all immediately), and then after you change it to turn off advertizing cookies, it goes through a slow percentage calculation. I gave up after 3 minutes, when it was at 64%.
It's quite obviously delaying as a dark pattern to make you give up and allow everything, but I wonder how legal that is?
Update: I left it running to see what would happen. Once the artificial delay completes, you're presented with an ominous warning:
"This page transmits information using https protocol. Some vendors cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols so the processing of your opt-out request is incomplete. To complete the opt-out process, please click here to resubmit your preferences."
Clicking on that link brings you to another page on their site that basically does the same thing, except with the following warning:
"Some opt-outs may fail due to your browsers cookies settings. If you would like to set opt-out preferences using this tool you must allow third party cookies in your browser settings.""
All preferences are of course set to "Yes". Changing them to "no" and submitting again does the same artificial delay with percentage that slows down the closer it gets to 100% (and then sticks at 100% for good measure).
After this 5 minute process, it finally says my preferences have been saved, but with all these caveats, I wouldn't be surprised if it's tracking me anyway, using those warnings about browser settings as a fig leaf to hide behind.
How was this allowed to go for 20 years without her knowing or facing the charges? What options does she have? Hasnt she been deprived of a right to speedy trial, leaving a lifetime of troubles for lost wages?
This highlights one of the hazards of a highly-automated future. A reason to put judges, purses, and other humans into the mix is to look for injustices and give people the right to make ad hoc exceptions.
If a mechanical process were to, say, photograph you at a red light camera, ticket you, and perhaps automatically take the funds from your account you might have no recourse. And once we have such a can imagine worse with opaque ML models and few to no humans in the loop.
Of course the system we have is also ripe for abuse, and can be unthinkingly rigid as well (think of “Brazil”). But better than full automation.
To disagree; this highlights that manual systems are flawed, have inappropriate priorities - or at best have inappropriate resources in the process things manually.
Imagine, if instead of a prosecutor adding this to a record, a computer did it and the prosecutor's office could spend time reviewing outstanding non violent charges.
I agree we need humans in the loop for things like the administration of justice.
But this is a case where humans _were_ in the loop yet acted like automatons themselves. They failed to apply the baseline level of judgment that would have stopped them filing felony charges for "embezzlement" of a VHS tape featuring a talking cat.
This exact thing is already happening with internet corporations. Google and Facebook can literally take away most of your digital life for you doing nothing wrong, and you'll have no recourse to get it back. You'll be hitting a wall of faceless automated replies saying that "your account will not be reinstated at this time and this decision is final".
I basically agree but it’s worth using some of what they do as a cautionary example when considering public administration. We willingly embrace inefficiency in government for some of these very reasons.
I wrote “basically” because large companies that are deeply integrated into public life (nationally or locally — consider free speech requirements in shopping malls) reasonably deserve extra scrutiny at the very least. You don’t, in theory, pay taxes to your local electricity utility yet hey are far more controlled by public policy than, say, your local fruit stand.
Unfortunately most discussions in government about FB or Google can most charitably be described as incoherent.
Though this does happen to paying customers as well, for example Android app developers who pay 30% on their in-app purchases to Google. To a lesser extent this also happens to YouTube creators who get their videos wrongly removed because copyright and who are paid by Google for ads that appear on their videos.
The real story here is the countless number of times this woman and millions of others have been discriminated against in employment, education, finance, housing and other areas, without any notice, for the mere suggestion of some long past wrongdoing.
Wouldn’t a modern democracy, as we hold ourselves up to be, disallow the unfettered snooping into of ones past for most employment, housing, etc?
I would think, more importantly, how many more people were charged for felony embezzlement for failing to return a video rental in Norman, Oklahoma, 20 years ago without their awareness? What motivated that chain of events?
This whole story needs some gravity, and more than what the local news station is giving it.
McBride said over the last 20 years, she's been let go from several jobs without being given a reason why. She told FOX 25, now, it all makes sense. "This is why... because when they ran my criminal background check, all they're seeing is those two words: felony embezzlement," McBride said.
Someone shared with me how they deal with this in Australia, and I wish they did that here in the US. Employers can't just run background checks and interpret the data any way they want.
You send the job description to the police, and they run the background check and just return the employer a "yes/no" as to whether the person is okay for the job description, based on the specifics of the job and the background.
Edit: Yes, there are concerns about doing this in the US. I thought it was worth sharing anyway, as there are probably changes you could make to get the "good" part of this working here.
While this is interesting, it seems really problematic that the police have the power to say “yes/no”. I guess this is a matter of trust, and and given the...issues...with US law enforcement, it’s hard to imagine them getting this right.
My assumption is that Australia has some specific part of the police force that does the yes/no based on objective checklists. Perhaps things like "conviction data only, not arrests".
But, yes, there would be some big hurdles to this in the US.
Yes, there would be issues implementing it in the US in exactly the same way. The current situation here, though, isn't working. Many people are unable to find employment because of the broad availability of not just conviction data, but arrest data too. And not just for felonies, but misdemeanors also. And companies are incented, via "right to work" type laws to just avoid anyone with any kind of record. Perhaps there's some government entity other than the police here that could be trusted with something like this.
In Dutch companies it’s done by Justis, a separate government agency that basically tells companies if you’re fit to do a certain job.
It’s based on what job you’re going to perform, so people that have money laundering convictions probably are still allowed to volunteer for the local Boy Scouts.
There are several levels and categories and it’s usually returned within a few days.
How often does the reverse happen? How often are ISP executives charged with felonies for hiding fees, misleading consumers, or charging for routers they never delivered? No, not consumers, consumer, singular, because it was one VHS tape, not thousands or millions affected.
Probably a bench warrant gone rogue over time. Surprised it didn't make its way into the NCIS system, ending up as a felony arrest related to a simple traffic stop.
Dispatchers and police don't have full access to the details of the warrant either. They see "felony" and immediately change the interaction protocol, as we have seen too often the past few years.
Ms. McBride will probably spend another ten years doing the "expunge" dance as well.
reply