An arrest is not a conviction
The most important sentence on this site, and what actually happens to a case between the jail and the courtroom.
By GotBusted News · August 14, 2026
<p>Every record on this site carries a line saying all persons are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law. It is not a disclaimer bolted on for legal cover. It is a description of what an arrest record is.</p> <h2>What an arrest actually establishes</h2> <p>An arrest establishes that a law enforcement officer believed there was probable cause. Probable cause is a low bar by design — it has to be, or officers could not act on developing situations. It is emphatically not proof, and the system that follows an arrest exists precisely because the initial judgment is often wrong or incomplete.</p> <h2>What happens after the jail</h2> <p>A prosecutor reviews the case and decides what, if anything, to file. Cases get declined outright. Charges get reduced. A single booking charge becomes three filed counts, or three booking charges become one. None of that is unusual and none of it appears on the original booking record.</p> <p>From there a case can be dismissed, pleaded, tried, or resolved through a diversion program. People are acquitted. Courts seal and expunge records. The jail roster that produced the original entry has no reason to follow any of it — its job ended when the person left custody.</p> <h2>Why the record still stands after the case ends</h2> <p>This is the part that surprises people. A booking record is a record of a booking. It remains factually accurate — that person was booked, on that date, on those alleged charges — even after the case ends in dismissal or acquittal. The record is not wrong; it is incomplete.</p> <p>That is why the disposition matters, and why we would rather hear from you than not. If a case was dismissed, you were acquitted, or the outcome changed, that is a correction and we make it for free.</p> <h2>A court date is not an arrest either</h2> <p>Our docket pages are a separate database and mean something different again. People land on a criminal calendar in ways that never involve a jail: a summons served by mail, a citation written and released at the roadside, a grand jury indictment. A hearing on the calendar means a case is scheduled. Nothing more.</p> <h2>How to read anything on this site</h2> <p>Treat every record as a snapshot of a public document at the moment it was read. It tells you what an agency said, on a day, in a system built for a different purpose than the one you are using it for. That is genuinely useful — and it is not a verdict.</p>