CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – The owner of a Nashville and Clarksville website group that publishes arrest booking information has died at age 44 from heart failure, amid an ongoing judge’s order that he pay $364,000 to a Kentucky man whose mugshot he wouldn’t take down.
Jason Wayne Steen owned and operated Scoop Nashville and Clarksville Today, formerly Scoop Clarksville, along with several other brands under the business name Scoop Media Group. The websites primarily publish arrest records, both on the sites and on social platforms including Facebook.
In this case, Scoop Nashville published the arrest mugshot of David Tindell of Paducah, Kentucky, on June 15, 2021. Tindell requested its removal two days later, on June 17, 2021, according to McCracken County, Kentucky, Circuit Court records. The charges against Tindell were later dismissed and expunged, on June 29, 2022.
“I was falsely accused of a rather egregious crime in Nashville that I didn’t do – I wasn’t there,” Tindell told Clarksville Now on Thursday. He said the alleged victim wasn’t even in the state at the time. He said he called Steen and asked him to remove the article. “He goes, Oh, no problem, if you’ll send me money via CashApp, we’ll take it down.”
But Tindell wasn’t just any person charged with a crime. He does website and social media management as part of his IT business. “I politely told him about the law,” Tindell said.
Pay-to-remove illegal in Kentucky
While it is legal to publish booking mugshots in Kentucky, it’s illegal to charge people a fee to remove them.
“KRS 61.8746 prohibits a person from using a booking photograph in a publication, or posting it on a website of booking photographs or official inmate photographs, if removal of the photograph requires payment of a fee,” according to a Kentucky Attorney General’s Office guide to the Kentucky Open Records Act.
Anyone who violates that law can be liable for damages of not less than $100 per day for the first 30 days after removal is requested, plus $250 per day for the next 30 days, plus $500 per day for each day thereafter, according to the Kentucky law.
That adds up to $364,000 from June 17, 2021, to Aug. 14, 2023, according to an order by Judge Joseph Roark requiring Steen to pay that amount.
Tindell said that instead of taking the mugshot down, Steen “came up with other stuff” and put him “on blast” on social media, then sent him an email saying, “Looks like you got some press today.”
Tindell filed suit, and after he won the Kentucky judgment, his attorney in Clarksville, Dennis Stanford, had the Steen case “domesticated,” meaning that the judge’s order could be enforced in Tennessee. Stanford had been working for months to get Steen served with papers and to obtain disclosures on Steen’s assets.
Steen dies from heart failure
But with legal actions still in process, Steen became ill. He posted to Twitter on Sept. 13 that he would be going on a ventilator. He died Friday night, Oct. 11, of heart failure, according to the Nashville Banner and his obituary from Sellars Funeral Home in Mt. Juliet. Steen, 44, had received a heart transplant in 2017.
Clarksville Today hasn’t been updated since Sept. 12, and Scoop Nashville since Sept. 11. No one from Scoop Nashville or Clarksville Today has responded to phone calls, emails or messages. There is no affiliation between Clarksville Today and Clarksville Now/5 Star Media Group.
Stanford told Clarksville Now that he intends to file a lien for the $364,000 against Steen’s estate.
Steen’s attorney, Elizabeth Birch with Fendley and Etson in Clarksville, said that he’d retained her only a couple of months ago, and her understanding was that he had planned to contest the Kentucky case, as it was a default judgment that he wasn’t aware of.
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