A John Smith might end up locally famous for a while, regret those Tequila shots leading to nude in the town square, damaging a statue, and a £500 fine. Some years after the magistrate passes sentence it ceases to exist and he's not obliged to tell. If you get three years for something more serious it never expires. If you're John Smith you're in luck having a common name, but if you have a rare name...
In former years the reporting is in some dusty library or newspaper microfiche archive forgotten until he runs for Prime Minister perhaps.
There's lots of cases where an innocent accused, or sometimes even the victim, can suffer significant reputational damage from a widely reported case. The adversarial system, and occasional trials by media, seems to encourage that.
I don't think having older, expired, reports of more minor offences moved to archive that charges to search, or requires you to have journalism ID or something leads to dumbification of anything. It shouldn't cease to exist, just become far less trivial to get at. More an attempt to restore balance, regardless of practicality.
A bad debt, even a lot of bad debt, expires in 5 or 6 years from your credit report, but a minor offence 20 years ago doesn't?
People generally don't care what you did in the ancient past. The only time it matters is when it is a big deal. Like that Republican in the primaries who fabricated an incident involving a knife. Without a public record we wouldn't know.
We need an uncensored public record so we can verify what people say and guide our future decisions.
I am fairly certain his saying "dumb and offensive things" is a huge part of his success. Where I am Trump has about 60% of the voters. When I talk to people they say they like the idea of the wall or that they do want muslims banned. These are each dumb and offensive and as far as I can tell the reason people in my area support Trump.
Whether or not you support Trump, if you understand what he is saying, they are objectively (or at least not much room for subjectivity) dumb and offensive.
For some practical context: I'm the only person in the world with my name. If you google me, page 1 is my professional details, page 2 starts showing ARCHIVED forum posts from a decade ago, page 3 has high school newspaper clippings from 15 years ago. In 5 minutes, you've run through my life. I'm thankful I never had any legal trouble.
But an expiry date, if I'm reading this right, of a few years? Many trial processes don't finish up by then. In my journalism class, I force the students to go on Lexis Nexis and find 10-20 articles in the past decade or older that have been written about whatever they're writing about. Primarily to make them realize that whatever they think is new is not new, and to challenge them to pursue a story that looks at the big picture.
Making it harder to find stories in the past only adds to the dumbification and self-absorption of society.