My Basic CRB check has been clean since 2022. The media strongly implies it should have remained dirty beyond that. Is this fact of any use to me? E.g. in search engine optimisation? Here are the key points in a nutshell. Narrative:- I was sentenced in October 2016 to 18 months in jail in Scotland and 10 years on the sex register.
- This happened after 4.5 months on remand, so the prison sentence was backdated by 4.5 months.
- Nothing about the backdating appears in the newspapers - they only recorded the date of sentencing.
- I therefore got out of jail in February 2017, a mere 4.5 months after my sentencing (to 18 months), and 4.5 months earlier than the newspapers would suggest is even possible (because readers don't know about the backdating plus some readers may not even know about the half-your-sentence principle), and began immediately marking my presence on social media to show that I was at was at large earlier than the publicly available maths would suggest (so I could distance myself from my media identity).
- Then in about 2020 the Rehabilitation Act changed in Scotland so that my rehabilitation period becomes 4 years not 10.
Present Circumstances:Finally in 2022 I got my clean Basic Certificate (both Scotland and UK wide). And yet the story in the media remains that I got sentenced to 18 months in 2016, for sexy things. The evidence I have at hand is a) Dirty 2021 CRB checks b) Clean 2022 CRB checks.
Where am I going with this? Most normal people would assume I couldn't possibly have a clean record by 2022. The following factors combined make my CRB check look prematurely clean:
- The fact that people don't know about the backdating, or that that's even a thing.
- That fact that people don't know (or have no internalised common knowledge) oif the rehabilitation period change in Scotland, if they even know "spent" records is a thing in the first place.
- The premature seeming social media presence.
- The fact that I have a clean record while the guilty person would still be on the sex register (I am on the register with a clean record but most people never imagine this is possible).
- The fact that the newspapers get my age wrong by 4 years (based on a court reporter's glance I guess?).
- The fact that I've maintained a career against the odds in the intervening years.
This looks advantageous but it's hard to say how to take advantage. Should there be some way to take advantage of this? All the evidence at hand makes things look like a tale of either exoneration or else differentiation from the person in the news article. If I had been exonerated for example how would the evidence look any different? The 2021 vs. 2022 CRB checks look like a simple expunging rather than an expiry. So for example, don't search engines respond more eagerly to exonerees than those with spent convictions? Should I tell a white lie to a search engine?
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