C.A. 1st;
A147047

The First Appellate District reversed a judgment. The court held that the California Bureau of Real Estate had no mandatory duty to remove from its website publicly available information about a licensee's convictions, including convictions that had subsequently been dismissed under Penal Code §§1203.4 and 1203.4a.

Licensed real estate salesperson Belinda Skulason sued the California Bureau of Real Estate, alleging that it wrongfully refused to remove from its public website a document revealing that she had previously been convicted of three misdemeanors. She asserted that the Bureau was required to remove the document because the convictions, while valid when entered, had subsequently been dismissed under §§1203.4 and 1203.4a. Under both statutes, the consequence of a dismissal is that the convicted person is, with certain exceptions, “released from all penalties and disabilities resulting from the offense of which he or she has been convicted.” According to Skulason, even though the fact of her prior convictions was not confidential, the disclosure of those convictions on the Bureau's website imposed a penalty or disability in violation of §§1203.4 and 1203.4a because the Bureau was “going out of its way to disseminate the information” by “publishing the convictions to potential employers with full knowledge that the convictions were now expunged.”