E-Mail This Article to a Friend IDENTITY CRISIS Suing to get their good names back BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Edward Bland, of Springfield, has what the Executive Office of Public Safety (EOPS) would call an "alias problem." Others might call it plain old identity theft. In Bland’s case, a guy named Donald Fowler — who has a list of criminal charges on his record — claimed to be Bland when stopped by police. At some point, police caught on that Fowler was using Bland’s name as an alias, and put that in the Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) database. With the two records linked in the CORI database, any time Fowler claims to be Bland, both records will come up.

That’s really useful for police, but really annoying if you’re Edward Bland, who’s been reduced to carrying around a letter from Hampden County assistant district attorney Patrick Sabbs to prove to potential employers that he is not Donald Fowler — and that he does not have a criminal record.

Bland’s problem is one of the most common complaints about the state’s CORI system (see "Record Time," News and Features, August 29, 2003). Now, with help from the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, Bland and others are fighting back with a class-action lawsuit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court last Thursday.

Similarly struggling is John Casey, of Boston, whose brother David’s CORI reads like a synopsis of the US criminal code. David used to use John’s identity, so now every time someone requests John’s CORI, they receive a list of David’s 74 criminal charges. This has proven extremely unhelpful in John Casey’s quest for a job as a career counselor, says Fran Fajama, an attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, in Boston. (Some 9000 public and private entities are certified to request CORIs for employment checks; for an ever-increasing list of jobs that involve contact with the young, the old, or the sick, employers are required to check CORIs.)

The suit claims that by failing to develop a system that can deliver accurate records, the Massachusetts Criminal History Systems Board (CHSB) — the agency that maintains the state’s CORI database — violates privacy and due-process guarantees under the laws and constitution of the Commonwealth. All three of the named plaintiffs (Jennifer Szall, of Lowell, is the third) claim to have notified the CHSB of the error, to no avail, and all three claim to have suffered real damages as a result of the erroneous reports.

CHSB executive director Barry LaCroix and EOPS spokesperson Ed Principe both declined to comment on the suit, for which they had not yet seen the complaint. Last August, LaCroix acknowledged that Bland’s situation happens, but declined to call it a mistake; the report correctly identifies that the charges belong to Fowler, he explained, and offers the additional information that Fowler has been known to pose as Bland. It’s up to the CORI user to determine what to do with that information.

Fajama will seek to have the case certified as a class-action suit, which could allow many of the 300-plus others in her files, as well as unknown others statewide, to join. But first, she says, she will seek an injunction to stop the CHSB from continuing to send out a CORI for John Casey, so maybe he can get a job without waiting for his lawsuit to make things right.