Criminal Records

A "criminal record" is not one document. It is five different records, kept by five different keepers, under five different sets of rules. The court keeps the case file. The police keep the arrest record. The state keeps a fingerprint-based repository, the rap sheet. The FBI keeps a national summary built from the states. And private data companies keep copies of whatever they were able to buy or type in, which is what most background checks actually show. Most of the confusion about criminal records, and most of the mistakes on background checks, come from mixing these five up. This guide separates them, state by state where the rules differ, and it names only government sources.

The court file. Every criminal charge that reaches a court leaves a public case file with the clerk: the charge, the pleas, the hearings, the disposition and the sentence. In every state the index of those cases is public unless a court sealed it, and in most states it can be searched online county by county. It is the only one of the five records that anyone can read without permission, and it is the source the other four draw on. The court records page on this site covers how to search it in each state.

The police record. An arrest report, a booking record, an incident report. These belong to the arresting agency, not the court, and most of them never become public in full. What the public sees is the arrest log or the jail roster, and an arrest is not a conviction. The arrest records page covers those.

The state repository. Every state runs a central criminal history repository, fed by fingerprints taken at booking and by dispositions reported by the courts. The Bureau of Justice Statistics surveys all of them every two years, and the 2022 survey, published in September 2024, covered all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Guam. The repository is the only record tied to a person by fingerprint rather than by name, which makes it the most accurate. It is also the one the public can least often see. Who may pull it, and for what, is decided by each state's statute, and that is where the states split into open and closed.

The FBI Identity History Summary. The FBI's national file, "often referred to as a criminal history or 'rap sheet'," is "a listing of certain information taken from fingerprint submissions kept by the FBI and related to arrests and, in some instances, federal employment, naturalization, or military service," per the FBI. It costs $18 and is released to the person it describes, not to a stranger. The FBI's other system, the National Crime Information Center, "contains records contributed by and accessible to criminal justice agencies nationwide," per the FBI; the public cannot query it at all.

The data broker copy. Private companies build criminal databases by buying court index data in bulk where courts sell it and by sending researchers into courthouses to pull records from the public terminals, then sell searches of the result to employers, landlords, attorney services and other companies. Their copy is only as good as what they bought and when they bought it, and it is governed by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act when it is used for hiring, housing or credit. That is the record most people mean when they say "I ran a background check," and it is the one furthest from the source.

Whether a stranger can get a person's state criminal history depends entirely on the state. Some states sell it to anyone. Some sell convictions only. Some release it only to the person, to employers with the person's fingerprints, or to agencies the statute names. The examples below are the states' own words.

Texas sells convictions to the public by name. The Department of Public Safety runs a Criminal History Conviction Name Search and says on it: "The Conviction Database is public record information extracted from the DPS Computerized Criminal History System (CCH). The information contained in CCH is only public if a conviction or deferred adjudication has been reported to the Department on an offense." The search returns "name-based results of all individuals that have been reported to TX DPS with a conviction or deferred adjudication," covering "arrests, prosecutions, and disposition of cases for individuals arrested for class B misdemeanor or greater." An arrest that ended without a conviction is not in the public database.

Florida sells the full state record to the public. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement "is the central repository for criminal history information for the state of Florida," and says "it is our responsibility to provide public access to this information when requested," per its criminal history record check page. "The fee for public requests is $24.00." The instant online search "costs $24.00, in addition to a $1.00 credit card processing fee," the results "will NOT be certified," and a certified search by mail takes six to seven business days.

Washington sells convictions and withholds the rest by law. The Washington State Patrol's WATCH system is "the official Internet source providing criminal history conviction records for the state of Washington only." It "includes conviction information, arrests less than one year old with dispositions pending, and information regarding registered sex and kidnap offenders," while "the WSP criminal history file may also contain additional information such as arrest records that is not open to the general public." Under the Criminal Records Privacy Act, RCW 10.97, "conviction data may be released without restriction. Non-conviction information is not available to the public," and "vacated cases, sealed records, and misdemeanor traffic violations are excluded from public background check results." A name and date of birth search is $11. The Patrol also states the limit of every name search in one sentence: "The only way to positively link someone to a criminal record is through fingerprint verification."

New Jersey sells a name check to employers and others. The State Police name-based check, the 212B form, may be requested by "governmental entities of this State, the federal government or any other state for any official governmental purpose; a person or non-governmental entity of any state for employment, volunteer work or other performance of services; private detectives, licensed by the New Jersey State Police," per the State Police portal. The fingerprint check, form 212A, is for licensing and other purposes the state defines.

California closes the repository. The California Department of Justice states it plainly on its record review page: "Access to criminal history summary records maintained by the DOJ is restricted by law to legitimate law enforcement purposes and authorized applicant agencies. However, individuals have the right to request a copy of their own criminal history record from the Department to review for accuracy and completeness. Requests from third parties are not authorized and will not be processed." Getting your own copy means submitting fingerprints and paying "a $25 processing fee to the DOJ." No employer, landlord, private investigator or data company can buy a California rap sheet, and no online search of the state repository exists for the public.

Other states fall along the same line, and each state page on this site names its repository, its rule and its fee. Pennsylvania sells a name check of the State Police central repository through its PATCH system for $22, or $27 notarized, on form SP 4-164. New York's court system, not its police, sells a statewide criminal history record search for $95, matched on the exact name and date of birth submitted, not certified, with sealed records left out. Illinois has made conviction information public since 1991 under the Uniform Conviction Information Act, and the State Police process a name-based conviction request for $16. New Jersey's State Police name check, form 212B, costs $20, or $12 for volunteer work, and cannot be processed until the person being checked approves it online, within seven days. Georgia's record is pulled at the sheriff's office or police department under the GCIC rules. Michigan's ICHAT, "the only public resource for name-based Michigan criminal history background checks," charges $10 a search, set by state law. Ohio has no public name search at all: the Attorney General's Bureau of Criminal Investigation runs fingerprint checks for the employers and licensing bodies the statutes name, and tells anyone who needs a check "for personal use" to go to the FBI, so the public route to an Ohio record is the county clerk of courts.

Some states go further than selling one search at a time: they sell the whole pile. Texas offers a Conviction Database Download of its public criminal history database and publishes the list of customers who have bought it. North Carolina's court system licenses its Remote Public Access program, "access to criminal and civil court data in all 100 North Carolina counties," to licensees who "may obtain real-time access or bulk data extracts," and tells them "it is the licensee's responsibility to build its own automated system from the bulk data provided." Florida's clerks sell bulk case data county by county, with daily files and commercial interfaces for high-volume buyers, as the Miami-Dade, Broward, Polk and Lee clerks do on their own sites. Those are the government paid systems behind many "instant nationwide" searches, and they are worth knowing about for a simple reason: what the state sells in bulk is the same index you can search yourself, one name at a time, usually for less.

If the state repository is closed, where does a California background check come from? From the courts, one county at a time.

California's own court rule opens the index and closes the file. Rule 2.503 of the California Rules of Court says "all electronic records must be made reasonably available to the public in some form, whether in electronic or in paper form, except those that are sealed by court order or made confidential by law," and requires each court to provide electronic access "both remotely and at the courthouse, to the extent it is feasible to do so," to "registers of actions, calendars, and indexes in all cases." The same rule lists the case types whose documents may be seen only at the courthouse, and "records in a criminal proceeding" is one of them. So a California criminal case can be found from home, by name, in the court's index and register of actions, with the charges, the dates and the outcome, while the documents themselves are read at a public terminal in the courthouse.

That index is the loophole, and it is not a secret. The same rule says in subdivision (g) that "the court may provide bulk distribution of only its electronic records of a calendar, register of actions, and index," so a California court may sell its whole index in bulk, and nothing else. The Superior Court of Los Angeles County, the largest trial court in the country, sells it one name at a time: its Public Access Online Services "allows you to search for a Criminal Case Number by defendant name in the Los Angeles Superior Court," and its fee page charges registered users $1.00 a search for the first ten searches in a month, on a sliding scale after that, with document images at $1.00 a page for the first five pages, $0.40 a page after, and $40 at most per document. Other superior courts give the same index away free on their websites, Sacramento "has discontinued all fees associated with online searches and document downloads," and some give it only at the counter. A company that wants "California criminal records" therefore buys or collects the index of each of the 58 superior courts it can reach, matches the names, and sells the pile as a statewide search. The state never sold it anything.

The rule also settles what happens to the copies. Subdivision (h) says that when a record the court made available "is made inaccessible to the public by court order or by operation of law, the court is not required to take action with respect to any copy of the record that was made by the public before the record became inaccessible." A case sealed this year stays in every copy made last year, by the rule's own words, and the only thing that reaches those copies is the federal law on consumer reports, covered below.

What that pile is missing is the point of this page. It is name-matched, not fingerprint-matched, so a common name pulls in other people's cases. It covers only the counties the company collected and only up to the date it collected them, so a case filed last month or in a county it skipped is not there. It shows what the court index showed on the day of collection, so a case the court later sealed or dismissed can still be in the copy. And it is a court index, so an arrest that never reached a charge is not in it at all. The state's own summary, the one that would settle all of that, is the one nobody but the person and the licensed agencies may see.

California then limits what may be done with the pile. Civil Code section 1786.18 forbids an investigative consumer reporting agency to furnish a report containing "records of arrest, indictment, information, misdemeanor complaint, or conviction of a crime that, from the date of disposition, release, or parole, antedate the report by more than seven years," and adds that "these items of information shall no longer be reported if at any time it is learned that, in the case of a conviction, a full pardon has been granted or, in the case of an arrest, indictment, information, or misdemeanor complaint, a conviction did not result." That is stricter than the federal rule in two ways: the seven years reach convictions, and an arrest that ended without a conviction drops out the moment the agency learns it. Labor Code section 432.7 then forbids an employer to "ask an applicant for employment to disclose, through any written form or verbally, information concerning an arrest or detention that did not result in conviction," and also to "seek from any source whatsoever, or utilize, as a factor in determining any condition of employment," any such record or any conviction "that has been judicially dismissed or ordered sealed pursuant to law." So the copy may contain the old case, the employer may not ask about it or use it, and the person who finds it on a report has both laws to point at.

Inside a state the court indexes are not uniform, because each clerk runs its own system. Three kinds exist.

The open county puts its criminal index online free, searchable by name, with the register of actions and the disposition. Most large counties in most states now do this, and the state pages on this site link each one.

The counter county has the index only on the public terminal in the courthouse, or on paper. Nothing stops a member of the public from sitting at that terminal all day, and nothing stops a company from paying someone to do exactly that. The next section is about that person, because the whole private database industry rests on them.

The paid county sells the search. Los Angeles charges per name. Several statewide systems charge per search, as Florida and Washington do at the repository level. Where a court or a state charges, the brokers pay once and resell many times, which is why a background check company can quote a lower price than the courthouse for a worse copy of the same record.

The state pages give the practical answer for each state: which counties are online, which charge, and where the free terminal is the only route.

The private databases are not fed by the courts. They are fed by people. A company that sells criminal searches pays a researcher in each county it covers to go to the courthouse, sit at the public terminal or the clerk's counter, pull every new criminal filing since the last visit, and key it into a laptop: name, case number, charge, filing date, and the disposition when there is one. That file is uploaded to the company and merged into the pile, and other companies buy the pile. Every "nationwide criminal search" sold to an employer, a landlord or a law office is that pile, whatever logo is printed on the report.

That pipeline breaks in ordinary ways, and nobody goes back to fix it. The researcher is sick for a week and the filings from that week are never entered, because the next visit starts from the next day, not from the missed one. The court has not computerized that day's filings, or that year's, so the terminal shows nothing for those dates and the paper files never get typed in. The terminal is down, the courthouse is closed for a holiday, the clerk's index is a month behind, and the visit is skipped. The researcher misreads a handwritten minute order and types the wrong disposition, or misspells a name so the case can never be matched to the person again. A case that sits in the clerk's file can therefore be missing from every database in the country, and the person running the search has no way to know it. A "clear" result from a database means nothing was found in what was collected, on the days it was collected. It does not mean there is no record, and no database can be treated as 100 percent reliable for that reason.

The reliable route is the one the databases are built from. Go to the courthouse of the county where the person lived and search the clerk's index yourself, or send an attorney service to do it. Attorney services are the courier and research companies that file papers and pull records at the courthouse for law firms, and they do the same work for anyone who hires them, a landlord, an employer, a private person, not only for attorneys. They are the people the background check companies themselves send when a client wants a courthouse verified result, so buying the search from the service directly is usually faster and cheaper than buying it through a company that would hire the same service and add its margin. The service reads the actual file, current to the day, and can bring back a certified copy of the disposition, which is the only document that settles an argument about what a record says.

California has 58 superior courts, one per county, and each runs its own case system, its own website and its own rules for who may search what. We checked every one of them. As of this writing 47 of the 58 run an online portal where criminal cases can be looked up by name from outside the courthouse, and Calaveras posts case information online without saying which case types. Ten do not, and for those the criminal index is reached only at the courthouse terminal, through a written request to the clerk, or not at all: Alpine's court says it "does not currently offer online access to court records via a public portal, nor is there a public access terminal" at its courthouse; Mono's "does not have an online search engine" and does every search itself; Inyo takes name searches by emailed form; Imperial's online lookup is by case number only and a search "by name and DOB or DL" is a criminal records request to the clerk; Contra Costa's online lookup covers civil, small claims and probate and sends criminal records to the clerk's window; and Humboldt, Plumas, Sierra, Tehama and Trinity offer payments, calendars or self-help online but no public case search at all. A person who has lived in three California counties can usually check two from a desk and must go, or send someone, for the third.

The 47 doors that are open are not open the same way, and the differences are where the searches fail. Alameda's portal sells unlimited name searches at $300 per 30 days. Orange, Nevada, Tulare, Amador and Del Norte require an account before a name search, and Amador's index starts in 2002. Napa limits clerk searches to ten names a day. San Mateo's index needs a call to the clerk for any criminal case filed before 1993, Sacramento researches cases only from 1989, Butte's index starts in 1988, Lassen's in 1994, Yuba's in 1999, Monterey's and Sutter's in 2008. Yuba takes record searches only in writing with a $15 fee, and Mendocino and Sutter charge the $15 search fee set by Government Code 70627 when the clerk has to find the case number for you. San Luis Obispo announced that from July 1, 2026 it "will no longer provide case summaries in response to third-party case information requests." And Santa Barbara's court states on its search page that "the Public Index shall not be re-copied or re-distributed without expressed consent from the Superior Court," which is the court saying, in its own words, that the pile the brokers sell was not supposed to be built from it.

Every one of the 47 is a name search and nothing more, and since 2021 that is not a court's choice. Rule 2.507 of the California Rules of Court lists the information that "must be excluded from a court's electronic calendar, index, and register of actions," and in All of Us or None v. Hamrick, decided in May 2021 and certified for publication, the Court of Appeal held that the rule "prohibits the Riverside Superior Court from allowing searches of its electronic criminal index by use of an individual's date of birth or driver's license number." The Supreme Court declined to review it. San Joaquin's court puts the result on its search page: "pursuant to Rule 2.507 of the California Rules of Court, party searches may not include date of birth or driver's license information. Searches are limited to a combination of first, middle, and last names only." So no California court index, online or at the terminal, will confirm that the John Smith in the case is your John Smith. That question is answered the way the next section describes, or not at all.

What the commercial "California criminal records" databases contain is a different and smaller thing. In our experience the statewide products the background check companies and the legal research services sell are built from about a dozen counties, the ones where the index could be collected in volume, plus whatever the courthouse researchers managed to key in elsewhere, all of it hand collected and name only. The companies all buy from the same few collectors, so the same holes show up on every screen, and there is no second, better copy behind any of them. That is how thin the foundation is: one hand typed pile, resold under many names. The complete California record, the Department of Justice summary built from fingerprints, is the one the statute keeps out of every commercial database.

The consequence for anyone hiring, renting or checking on a person in California is that the cheapest search is the least complete one, and the price rises with completeness. A database search covers the counties the collector reached, as of the last collection. A search of the court's own portal covers that county, today, by name only. An attorney service covers whichever courthouses you name, as of today, with the file in hand. A fingerprint check through an agency authorized by statute covers the whole state and is available only for the purposes the law names.

Court indexes identify a defendant by name, sometimes with a birth year or a partial date of birth, and never with a Social Security number. So a hit in an index or a database is a name, not a person. For a common name in a large county the same search returns other people's cases, and nothing in the index itself tells them apart. That is why the Washington State Patrol says the only way to positively link someone to a criminal record is through fingerprint verification, and why the federal law on employment reports makes the reporting company responsible for strict procedures on public record information: the matching is the part most likely to be wrong.

A professional researcher can usually pin a record to the right person, but not always, and the rate depends on how common the name is: close to certain with an uncommon name, maybe eight times out of ten with a common one, and sometimes not at all. The method is the one used in judgment enforcement and skip tracing. Start with an address: the address on the case, the address on the booking, the address on the docket at the time of filing. Then find who lived at that address, the family and the household, through the public records that carry addresses. Then pull the property records for that address, the deed, the assessment, the tax bill. The name on the criminal case has to leave at least two or three fingerprints on the public record at the same address and the same time, a residence, a relative, a deed, before a careful researcher will say the case belongs to the person in front of them. One fingerprint is a guess. Three is an identification. A database that prints a hit on a name alone has done none of that, and its report says so in small print.

Everything above is about state crimes, which are charged in county courts. Federal crimes are charged in the United States District Court for the district where the crime happened, and there is nothing county about it. There are 94 district courts, under 13 courts of appeals. California has four, and the statute that draws them, 28 U.S.C. 84, says "California is divided into four judicial districts to be known as the Northern, Eastern, Central, and Southern Districts of California" and assigns every one of the 58 counties to exactly one of them. A federal case from any California county, from Los Angeles or from Alpine, is on the docket of one of those four courts, and all four are on PACER. Which one matters the moment you need more than a name search: an old paper file is ordered from that district's clerk, a courthouse visit is to that district's courthouse, and a case number tells you the district by its prefix.

The Northern District of California, in the statute's words, "comprises the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Del Norte, Humboldt, Lake, Marin, Mendocino, Monterey, Napa, San Benito, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Sonoma," 15 counties, and "court for the Northern District shall be held at Eureka, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose."

The Eastern District of California covers 34 counties, the whole Central Valley and the mountains: "Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Colusa, El Dorado, Fresno, Glenn, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Lassen, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Modoc, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Solano, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tehama, Trinity, Tulare, Tuolumne, Yolo, and Yuba." Court "shall be held at Bakersfield, Fresno, Redding, and Sacramento."

The Central District of California covers 7 counties and more people than any other federal district in the country, in three divisions. The Western Division "comprises the counties of Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura," with court at Los Angeles. The Southern Division "comprises Orange County," with court at Santa Ana. The Eastern Division "comprises the counties of Riverside and San Bernardino," with court "in the city of Riverside, the city of San Bernardino, or not more than 5 miles from the boundary of either such city."

The Southern District of California "comprises the counties of Imperial and San Diego," and court "shall be held at San Diego."

So a person who lived in Bakersfield was charged federally, if at all, in the Eastern District, at Bakersfield or Fresno. A person from Riverside or San Bernardino was charged in the Central District's Eastern Division at Riverside, not in Los Angeles. A person from Santa Cruz or Monterey was charged in the Northern District at San Jose. The county tells you the district, and the district tells you where the file is.

PACER, Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is the federal judiciary's own system, run by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, and it covers every district court, every court of appeals and every bankruptcy court in the country. "Anyone can access PACER to view federal court records," it says, once registered. Its Case Locator searches "a nationwide index of federal court cases," updated daily, so one search covers every federal district in California, or every district in the country, while a search in a specific court "is updated immediately." A criminal docket shows the charging document, the pleas, the hearings, the judgment and the sentence, and the documents themselves are readable, which is more than California's own rule allows for its state criminal files. The price is "$0.10 per page," and for a document "you won't be charged more than $3 per document," while a name search is charged by the page of results "even if the search displays 'no matches found,'" with no maximum. Users "are billed on a quarterly basis if they accrue more than $30 in the previous quarter," so a person checking one name pays nothing. PACER's own tip: search by case number rather than by a common party name, because a common name "may yield a high number of pages." The Bureau of Prisons runs a separate free inmate locator to "locate the whereabouts of a federal inmate incarcerated from 1982 to the present," which answers the narrower question of whether a person served federal time and when they were released.

So does PACER show every federal criminal record for every county? For the cases the federal courts have filed electronically, yes, and no county is skipped, because the district covers the county. What it does not show is its own list, and the list is short.

Cases from before electronic filing. The federal courts say it themselves: "most cases created before 1999 are maintained in paper format only," and "documents from criminal cases filed prior to November 1, 2004, are only available electronically to the parties in the case." So a federal criminal case from the 1990s may have a bare docket entry on PACER or none, and its documents are read on paper at the clerk's office or ordered from a Federal Records Center. The National Archives holds the older files, more than 2.2 billion pages of court records going back to about 1790, and notes that "federal court records less than 15 years old are still in the possession of individual courts." A federal conviction from the 1980s is real and is not on PACER.

Sealed cases. An indictment is sealed until the arrest, a cooperating witness's case can stay sealed for years, and a judge can seal any document. PACER's own answer is one line: "Sealed documents, including sealed indictments, are not available to the public and cannot be found on PACER." Federal juvenile cases are closed by statute, 18 U.S.C. 5038, which says the records "shall be safeguarded from disclosure to unauthorized persons" and "may not be released when the request for information is related to an application for employment, license, bonding, or any civil right or privilege."

Petty offenses on federal land. A ticket written on a military base, in a national park or in a federal building is a federal criminal charge, but it goes to the Central Violations Bureau, "a national center charged with processing U.S. District Court Violation Notices (tickets) issued and payments received for offenses committed on federal property, like national parks and military installations," which keeps its own ticket system. Unless the person contests the ticket and it becomes a docketed case, a PACER search never returns it.

The other federal courts. Courts martial are military records, not PACER. Tribal court cases are tribal records. The District of Columbia's local crimes are charged in the D.C. Superior Court, which is not on PACER.

Name matching, again. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 49.1 requires filings to show only the year of a person's birth and the last four digits of a Social Security number, so PACER identifies a defendant the way a county index does, by name and birth year, and the same pinning work applies.

No expungement. There is no general federal expungement statute. The one narrow exception is 18 U.S.C. 3607, which lets a court put a first-time simple drug possession offender on probation "without entering a judgment of conviction" and, for a person under 21, expunge the record afterward. A dismissed federal case stays on the docket as dismissed. So the federal record is more complete than the state record in one way, nothing leaves it later on the person's own motion, and less complete in the ways listed above.

A background check company that sells criminal records for hiring, housing or credit is a consumer reporting agency under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, whatever it calls itself. Two sections of that law decide what it may show.

Under 15 U.S.C. 1681c, a report may not include "civil suits, civil judgments, and records of arrest that, from date of entry, antedate the report by more than seven years or until the governing statute of limitations has expired, whichever is the longer period," or "any other adverse item of information, other than records of convictions of crimes which antedates the report by more than seven years." Convictions carry no federal time limit, and an arrest without a conviction drops out after seven years.

Under 15 U.S.C. 1681k, a company that reports public record information for employment must either notify the person at the time or "maintain strict procedures designed to insure that whenever public record information which is likely to have an adverse effect on a consumer's ability to obtain employment is reported it is complete and up to date," and "items of public record relating to arrests, indictments, convictions, suits, tax liens, and outstanding judgments shall be considered up to date if the current public record status of the item at the time of the report is reported." A sealed case reported as an open conviction, a dismissed charge reported as pending, a case matched to the wrong person of the same name: each is a record that is not "complete and up to date," and each is the reason the company is supposed to go back to the court before it reports.

The federal regulator has said what a name-only match is worth. In its advisory opinion of November 2021, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau stated that a consumer reporting agency must follow reasonable procedures to assure "maximum possible accuracy," and "that the practice of name-only matching in particular is far from sufficient to meet that standard." The Bureau's director put the arithmetic plainly in his statement on the opinion: "it's not unlikely that thousands, even tens of thousands, of individuals may share a particular first and last name combination." A background check built from court indexes that carry no date of birth, which is every California index by rule, is name-only matching unless the company did the pinning work described below.

The employer's duties come from the same law, set out by the Federal Trade Commission: written notice "in a stand-alone format" and written permission before the report is pulled; before any adverse decision, "a notice that includes a copy of the consumer report you relied on to make your decision" plus the summary of rights; and after it, a notice with "the name, address, and phone number of the consumer reporting company that supplied the report," the right to dispute, and the right to a free copy within 60 days. A person who finds a wrong or stale criminal record on a background check disputes it with the company, and the clerk's certified disposition is the document that wins.

Every state has a way to close a criminal record, and the words differ. Illinois, for one, provides "expungement, sealing, and immediate sealing" in a single statute, 20 ILCS 2630/5.2, with separate rules for arrests that ended without charges, for supervision, for probation and for convictions. Washington excludes "vacated cases, sealed records, and misdemeanor traffic violations" from its public results by statute. Nevada seals after a waiting period that runs from the end of the sentence. California dismisses under Penal Code 1203.4 without erasing. Each state page names the statute, the waiting period and the effect.

What no state order does is reach a copy that left the courthouse before the order. The court index drops the case, the repository marks it, and the broker's database keeps whatever it bought the year before. The Fair Credit Reporting Act's "current public record status" rule is the only tool that forces the copy to catch up, and it works only when the person disputes.

If you want to know whether a person was convicted of a crime in a state, the state repository answers it best and the state decides whether you may ask. Where the state sells it, buy it there, by name in Texas, Florida, Washington and the other open states, with the fingerprint version wherever the purpose allows it.

If you want to know whether a person was charged in a county, the court index answers it, free at the courthouse and often free online, with the disposition on the docket.

If you want to know whether a person was arrested, the arresting agency's log or the jail roster answers it for recent arrests, and the arrest records page explains the rest.

If you want to know what a background check company will show an employer, the answer is the company's copy, which you are entitled to see and dispute under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

And if you want your own record, every state repository and the FBI will give it to you, with fingerprints, for a fee: $25 in California, $18 at the FBI.