When Michael Lakey stopped off at his local gas station in Hayden, Alabama, to pick up ice for a barbecue, he was greeted with clenched-teeth hostility by the clerk.

Something, he knew, was awry.

At the store counter was a stack of copies of Just Busted, a “rogue’s gallery” tabloid costing $1 featuring the mugshot photographs of people arrested in the local area and the crimes they are suspected of committing.

And inside, on page 20, was a picture of Lakey, 39, a law-abiding metal worker with a wife, Gloria, a one-year-old granddaughter and four foster kids to support.

The caption next to his mugshot read, to his shock, “that I’d been arrested for sexual assault of a child under 12 years old”.

The caption was, to put it mildly, erroneous.

In May 2009, Lakey had been issued a ticket for driving on expired license plates and duly paid the fine, but the payment had been incorrectly logged into the police computer system. Then just over a year later, he was pulled over again. With no receipt on his person to prove he had paid his fine, he was arrested and had his mugshot taken.

And under state public access laws, Just Busted’s publishers could access arrestees’ mugshots from police departments.

It later emerged that the Just Busted graphic artist responsible for compiling the issue had mistakenly paired Lakey’s picture with another suspect’s charges.

Lakey knew that the chances of people in the community seeing his mugshot with the inaccurate accompanying charge were high – Just Busted had a circulation of over 10,000 in the area. But he did not anticipate that those he had considered friends and confidants would make a pariah of him.

Three days after publication, the door of the Lakey’s house rapped purposefully. On the stoop stood several social workers from the state’s department of human resources, responsible for child protection services.

“They had seen my mugshot and they came out with the intention of taking our foster kids and our granddaughter if we could not prove that my mugshot with those charges was false,” Lakey said in a south Texas brogue.

The agony lasted for the four hours it took to reach the Blount County officer responsible for sexual abuse cases, who confirmed that Lakey was not a child molester.

Just Busted printed a series of retractions, but locals’ suspicions festered and grew. Death stares on the street escalated.

“A few days after the magazine article came out my wife started receiving [anonymous] threatening phone calls from people telling her I was gonna get what I had coming to me and if she knew what was good for her she would pack her and the kids up and leave, that [I was going to] get beat up or killed,” Lakey said.

Michael Lakey’s mugshot in Just Busted erroneously describes him as having been charged with child sex abuse. Photograph: none

Their home was vandalised on numerous occasions.

Months later, shortly after his wife died, Lakey and his granddaughter packed up and left Hayden for Texas.

Then last year, Lakey successfully sued Just Busted for defamation, winning a five-figure sum. He said that publishing mugshots before suspects have been tried undermined a sacred tenet of American jurisprudence and hoped his case would force Just Busted to change its ways.

“Everybody’s innocent until proven guilty,” he said before taking the stand in December in Jefferson County court in Birmingham. “But if you put somebody in a magazine like that you’re already saying that they’re guilty to the community.”

His attorney, James Morgan, believes that these publications are not the crime-stopping news organizations they claim to be. “[They] deal in schadenfreude …allowing an audience to view people at their worst and to ridicule them.” He points out Just Busted’s regular “Drunk Tank” and “Sticky Fingers” sections in which the inebriated and suspected thieves are singled out for mockery.

During testimony, Just Busted’s editor explained how the tabloid is compiled.

Matthew DeGlopper, the paper’s editor, explained that he did not employ a copy editor or fact-checker to guard against errors. Each issue is put together by a graphic artist rather than a journalist.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lakey is not the paper’s first victim of an egregious error. A previous designer had made five mistakes in seven issues. And in 2014, a Sevierville, Tennessee, man sued Just Busted for defamation, saying he was wrongly described as a rape suspect; that suit was eventually settled.

A ‘deprivation of liberty’

Just Busted is a major player in the mugshot publication market with titles across several states. But since 2010, copycats have sprouted across the country: Gotcha! covers central Virginia, the Hard Times in Alabama, Green Mountain Mugshots in Vermont, Jailbirds Rocks in Oklahoma.

There are others who have been defamed by mugshot magazines, including James Suddarth, a 46-year-old Charlottesville, Virginia, man who successfully sued for defamation in 2012 after the Crime Times wrongly labelled him as a felon who had fired a gun in a public building.

Some mugshot websites have also failed in their fact-checking duties. A lawsuit that gained national attention in 2014 was filed after people complained about being charged hundreds of dollars to remove the mugshots even if the cases against those arrested had been dropped. Two sites eventually settled the suit and agreed to stop charging.

Mugshot publications and free-press advocates argue that they are providing a civic service, and one of Just Busted’s owners, Wanda Gilham, said in December that her magazines have led to the capture of fugitives.

In 2011, a woman who had been been sexually assaulted three years earlier in Saginaw, Michigan, identified James W Gunn as her attacker only after seeing his picture in a local mugshot magazine after he had been arrested on a separate charge.

Scott Ciolek, an Ohio-based attorney who brought the 2014 lawsuit, said that cases such as Lakey’s are extremely hard to win, which does little to incentivise editors to take measures to prevent defamation.

“When a magazine makes mistakes like this they will argue that the error was made by the local sheriff’s office,” Ciolek said. “And in most states, sheriff’s departments have immunity from tort liability.”

Michael Lakey looking at Just Busted magazine before his case. Photograph: Johnny McDevitt

Ciolek, who says there are at least 200 mugshot publications across the country, went on to say that while regulating mugshot magazines seems unlikely, there are other options available to reign in “fly-by-night operations”. He pointed to the FBI’s discretionary policy on the availability of booking photos as one that could be rolled out to other law enforcement agencies. He also called for magazines to be held to the same defamation standards as an individual rather than a newspaper.

“Just like if you were to keep a lion in your backyard and somebody climbs over the fence and gets attacked by it, you are liable as its owner,” Ciolek said.

Some states have moved to restrict public access to mugshots. In July, the federal appeals court in Ohio for the sixth circuit ruled 9 to 7 that federal booking photos are no longer public records, with Chief Judge R Guy Cole Jr remarking that “these images preserve the indignity of a deprivation of liberty, often at the [literal] expense of the most vulnerable among us”.

‘My reputation completely shredded, that was the worst part’

Gemma, who does not wish to have her real name published, was a well-respected hospital staff nurse in upstate South Carolina. But in 2012, she had fallen into the grip of post-natal depression.

Gemma, then 41, stole medication from the hospital and attempted to take her own life. But after taking the pills, she panicked and called paramedics.

She was arrested for theft of a controlled substance. She thought it couldn’t get any worse until, a week after the arrest, her father called her in tears.

He had just seen the front cover of Jail Report and his daughter’s picture with an accompanying caption which read: “Distribution of LSD and crack cocaine to a person under 18.”

“I was already at the lowest point of my life,” she recalled, her voice cracking. “And then to be humiliated and shamed, my reputation completely shredded, that was the worst part of that time, it just amplified everything.

Gemma didn’t leave her home for months, fearing recrimination from the community. But after a pre-trial intervention the charges against her were dropped and she has resumed working as a nurse.

In Gemma’s case, fault initially lay with administrators at the local county jail who had inputted the wrong charge with her mugshot, but she never received an apology.

“An officer spoke to me and her explanation was ‘someone clicked the wrong button’.”

The paper still has the digital issue with Gemma’s front cover mugshot on its Facebook page at the time of writing. Her numerous attempts to have it removed have gone unreplied.