Get the certified paperwork before you email anybody
Go to the clerk of courts in the county where you were arrested and ask, by docket number, for a certified copy of the disposition: dismissal, nolle prosequi, acquittal, or completion of a diversionary program. Write down the docket number, the county, the court and the arrest date while you're at the counter, because every form after this asks for all four.
If a judge has already signed an expungement, sealing, limited-access or nondisclosure order, get a certified copy of that too, showing the case caption and the docket number. That order, not the disposition, is what makes a publisher delete. If nobody has entered one, file the petition: in Pennsylvania the forms are the court system's own, Petition for Expungement under Pa.R.Crim.P. 490 for summary offenses and 790 for court cases, plus Petition for Limited Access under 791, all on the Pennsylvania courts forms page.
Check whether Pennsylvania already sealed it for you before you file, and check your own state's rules, which will be different. Clean Slate moves any charge that ended in something other than a conviction, along with second- and third-degree misdemeanors after seven conviction-free years, qualifying offenses after ten and summary convictions after five, once restitution is paid. Figure on one to three months once you're eligible.
Send the order to the site that's publishing it
Mail or email the order to each site holding a copy, one site at a time. Mugshots.com is the documented route: its record maintenance page says the site does not charge to remove or update an arrest record, and that it removes only for expungement, seal, no information, restriction, identity theft or death.
Email the court documentation to the address on that page with your Mugshots.com ID in the message, and scan it clean, because non-legible documents are discarded and no notification is provided. The site says the process can take up to ten business days and guarantees nothing about timing, so put a follow-up date in your calendar instead of waiting on an answer that may never arrive.
A dismissal, acquittal, nolle prosequi, exoneration or pardon routes to a second address there and buys you an annotation rather than a removal, with the disposition displayed on every page about your arrest. If that's all you're holding, go back to the petition in the first step. And if any site you write to demands money, screenshot the demand before you answer it, because that screenshot is what Google's form asks for later.
Use your state's statute to put a clock on it
Serve the order yourself, in writing, on the publisher. In Georgia, O.C.G.A. section 10-1-393.5 requires the operator to take the booking photograph down without fee or compensation, within thirty days of a written request sent by certified mail with return receipt requested or by statutory overnight delivery to the registered agent or principal place of business. Include your name, date of birth, date of arrest and the arresting agency.
Texas only reaches a site that charges 150 dollars or more to remove, or any fee at all to correct or modify. Against a free-removal aggregator, chapter 109 does not apply, and Georgia's statute or the court order is your only lever. Where it does apply, Texas Business and Commerce Code section 109.004 makes the site verify the disputed information with the law enforcement agency at no cost, finish its investigation no later than the 45th business day after it receives notice of the dispute, and give written results within five business days of finishing, and it bars any fee to remove or correct. Section 109.005 turns publishing after notice of an expunction or nondisclosure order into a claim worth up to 500 dollars per violation plus 500 dollars for each continuing day, with court costs and attorney's fees.
California Civil Code section 1798.91.1 is narrower and blunter: it's unlawful to solicit, require or accept payment to remove, correct or refrain from publishing a booking photograph, and the person in the photo can sue for the greater of 1,000 dollars per violation or actual damages, plus costs and fees. Don't pay a removal fee anywhere. Paying deletes the evidence Google's form asks for in the next step.
File with Google only if the site charged you
Google's personal-content categories are a closed list, and the only one that reaches an arrest record is content on sites with exploitative removal practices. All three conditions on Google's policy page have to be true: you're the subject of the content, the site isn't a business review site, and the site requires payment to have the content removed. File the URLs through the content removal form, one per line, with your screenshots of the payment demand and a written explanation of how the site is exploitative.
Don't file this against a site that removes for free. Mugshots.com states in writing that it does not accept payment for removal, so it fails that third condition and this door stays shut on it. Don't file an arrest URL through Results about you either, which covers phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, Social Security numbers, passport numbers and driver's license numbers. Where a free-removal aggregator is holding the copy, the paperwork in the first three steps is the whole route.
Google also won't remove a result that sits in the public record on a government or official site, so leave the sheriff's booking page and the clerk's docket out of the request. Google publishes no turnaround time for a removal decision, so anyone quoting you one is guessing. When a page does come down, flush the stale listing with Google's Refresh Outdated Content tool, which needs a Google login and does nothing while the page is still live. And a granted removal is Google only: Bing, DuckDuckGo and the site itself keep serving the page.
Dispute every background screener, one at a time
No court order reaches a screening company's private copy, so dispute each company separately, free of charge. Send the report with the disputed entry identified and the certified disposition attached. The CFPB's list of consumer reporting companies is your mailing list.
15 U.S.C. section 1681i gives the agency thirty days to run a reasonable reinvestigation, requires it to promptly delete or modify anything inaccurate or unverifiable, and requires written results within five business days of finishing. Section 1681c(a)(2) keeps an arrest off a report once it's more than seven years old or the governing statute of limitations has run, whichever is longer. Section 1681c(b)(3) switches those limits off for a job paying, or reasonably expected to pay, 75,000 dollars a year or more, so don't lean on the seven years for a senior role.
If you're in Pennsylvania, cite section 9122.5(a.1) in the dispute. Added by Act 36 of 2023, it bars anyone from using an expunged or limited-access record for employment, housing or school matriculation, and section 9183 backs it with damages of not less than 100 dollars per violation plus costs and attorney's fees. We haven't seen it tested against an out-of-state screening company, so treat it as a right on the books rather than a button you press.
Clear the copies the government still holds
See what your state repository has on you. In Pennsylvania that's form SP 4-170, mailed to the State Police Central Repository with a nonrefundable certified check or money order, and the form warns a response may take three months or longer. Start it the week you start everything else, not after a job offer is on the table.
In California, ask the police department to pull a nonviolent arrestee's booking photograph off social media. Penal Code section 13665 gives them fourteen days from the request and applies retroactively, but it doesn't reach the department's own website, so the jail roster stays up.
Write the agency that contributed the entry, not the FBI. Under 28 CFR 16.34 you apply directly to that agency, or you mail the challenge to FBI, Criminal Justice Information Services Division, ATTN: SCU, Mod. D-2, 1000 Custer Hollow Road, Clarksburg, WV 26306. The FBI forwards it to the contributing agency either way and changes its record only on official word back.
Where this stops, and what it costs you to run yourself
Accurate news coverage has no legal route in the United States, so the only door at a newspaper is that paper's own policy. Per the Boston Globe's Fresh Start FAQ, its committee meets monthly and prioritizes older stories, is unlikely to act on the most serious crimes, and holds public figures and people in positions of public trust to a higher standard. Send yours through the Fresh Start appeal page.
None of this seals or expunges the court's own record. Don't plan on suing an offshore operator either, since a statutory damages claim needs a defendant somebody can serve and collect against: use the statute as leverage inside the letter, and treat the payout as a bonus you will probably never collect.
You can run every step above yourself. What it costs is calendar and paperwork: a certified copy per court, a separate email or certified letter per publisher, a separate dispute per screener, one line per URL at Google, and a nonrefundable fee for the state repository check. Then thirty days on a screener dispute before anybody owes you an answer, and 45 business days on a Texas dispute only where that chapter reaches the site.