State, county, courts must coordinate efforts a lot better
BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times
For the last three years, Virgil G. Vaughan has been trying to get his life back.
Vaughan is the victim of a particularly loathsome form of identity theft.

On Jan. 30, 2007, Gliance B. Vaughn, a stepbrother, was arrested and charged with driving under the influence. Vaughn, whose license had been revoked, fraudulently identified himself as Virgil Vaughan.

Posing as Virgil, Gliance was able to bond out of jail despite having a lengthy arrest record, and before his fingerprints tipped off police to his scheme. There was never a suspicion that the real Virgil Vaughan had anything to do with the fraud. Still, he has been unable to scrub his stepbrother’s illegal acts from his driving and criminal records. The real Virgil Vaughan is three classes short of earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

But until the Illinois secretary of state, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Illinois State Police coordinate and update their databases to clear Virgil G. Vaughan’s name, he is the one who is being treated like a criminal. He was turned away by several prospective employers, including the Transportation Security Administration in 2008 and the U.S. Border Patrol in 2009.

“For a whole year, I was unemployed. I put in applications everywhere and ended up finding a job at a factory doing labor work because they really didn’t do a background check,” Virgil told me. “It’s a terrible job, but I need the money.”

Gliance was paroled in February after spending a year at Logan Correctional Center on a DUI charge, his fourth.

Although their last names are spelled differently, Virgil G. Vaughan and Gliance B. Vaughn had the same father. He passed away 13 years ago. Virgil’s mother paid $1,500 to a lawyer in an attempt to get the negative information removed from her son’s driving record. But despite obtaining two court orders that were signed by a Circuit Court judge, the lawyer who represented Virgil informed him on Nov. 26, 2007, that his license was “still revoked.”

“Apparently they are disregarding the two court orders that I sent to their office, attorney Bruce E. Brandwein wrote.

Even after the Illinois secretary of state removed the revocation and DUI charge from Virgil’s driving record, there was another problem.

“From our perspective, Virgil G. Vaughan got a court order that he was a wrongful defendant,” said Beth Kaufmann, a spokeswoman for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White. “We need a court order that says the DUI that appears on Virgil Vaughan’s record should be part of Gliance’s record, and shows the date of the offense, and the date of the conviction,” Kaufmann said.

Besides hiring a lawyer, Barbara Sanders, Virgil’s mother, hounded two assistant state’s attorneys and made countless phone calls to the secretary of state’s office in Springfield. What Sanders didn’t know, and what no one told her at the time, was that until the “Virgil Vaughan” record was purged, the derogatory information would continue to show up in a background check for “Virgil Vaughan.”

“We didn’t know there was another layer,” she told me. “We were just dealing with the secretary of state. If lawyers don’t know this stuff, then you can’t expect citizens to know it.”

On Tuesday, Assistant State’s Attorney Guy Lisuzzo filed an “Identity Theft Order” on behalf of Virgil Vaughan asking that the State Police, among others, remove his name from all official records in connection with the listed arrests and convictions. I hope he dotted all of the i’s and crossed all of the t’s because this bureaucratic snafu is the kind of thing that can take a promising young man down.

Victims of this kind of identity theft can obtain a “Petition for Correction and Sealing of an Arrest and Conviction Record Due to Identity Theft,” from the clerk of the county Circuit Court’s office or go online to www.clerkofthecircuitcourt.org.