Tag: criminal records

Minnesota’s sweeping new expungement law takes effect

1932MinnesotaSnowScene640Beginning January 1st, 2015, many Minnesotans will have a meaningful shot at a second chance through criminal records expungement. For decades, many individuals have relied upon (and often languished under) a court’s inherent authority to expunge (or seal) criminal records, but recent Minnesota Supreme Court decisions effectively eviscerated that remedy. Without a legislative act expressly granting judicial authority to seal records held within executive branch agencies, the majority of petitioners were granted orders sealing only court records—leaving numerous publicly accessible criminal records untouched.

The new law, passed with bipartisan support and building upon momentum gained with last year’s Ban the Box for private employers, changes that.   It provides new authority for expunging (sealing) both criminal and juvenile records held by executive branch agencies; requires data mining companies to observe expungements, protects employers and landlords hiring and renting to individuals with expunged records, addresses victimization and housing evictions, and clarifies a number of procedural issues.  The standard for granting expungement remains that under current law, requiring the court to balance private and public interests.

While by no means a silver bullet, this new legislation will help a significant number of Minnesotans currently locked out of employment, housing, licensure, education, and countless other of life opportunities, by providing a true opportunity for a second chance.

Here is an explanation of the new law’s specific provisions. 

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American criminal record exceptionalism (I): A Spanish comparison

spainA comparative perspective is extremely useful for appreciating the status of individual criminal record information in the U.S.   In this and future blog posts, we would like to share information about criminal record law and policy in continental Europe and the U.K., including some important decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.

We begin with Spain, the continental European country we know best. On the basis of past and on-going research, we believe that Spain’s law and policy on criminal records is representative of continental Europe. This is not surprising because, to some extent, all E.U. member states share a legal tradition and are subject to E.U. laws and ECHR’s judgments. However, to be sure, there are some national differences among E.U. member states.

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Clean slate remedies help overcome collateral consequences

Eliza Hersh, director of the Clean Slate Clinic at the East Bay Community Law Center and one of CCRC’s contributing authors, has co-authored a most persuasive op ed in the LA Times, which we are pleased to reprint here in full.  

Should a shoplifting conviction be an indelible 1016829040562382727EwjStKwcscarlet letter? Not in California

What exactly is the appropriate punishment for someone who commits a low-level, nonviolent crime? Should a conviction for minor drug possession, shoplifting or writing a bad check result in a lifetime of stigma and denied opportunities, or do people with criminal records deserve a second chance?

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A pardon celebrates the life of a public defender

One of the 12 pardons granted by President Obama on December 17 went to Albert Stork of Delta, Colorado, long-time advocate for indigent criminal defendants on the rural Western Slope.  Al Stork pled guilty in 1987 to filing a false tax return, and served six months in federal prison. While his conviction came about in an unusual way, what makes Al’s case so special is what he did with his life afterwards.

Al Stork’s conviction arose out of his family circumstances. In the early 1980s, one of his two older brothers was an elected prosecutor in Colorado’s Sixteenth Judicial District; the other was a fugitive from Colorado authorities, having spent most of his life (as Al put it) “either in jail or on the lam.” Al himself, then in his early 20s, was leading what his defense lawyer described years later as “an unexceptional and unmotivated middle class life,” working construction and selling a little marijuana on the side.

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Wisconsin high court holds youthful offenders entitled to “a fresh start”

The Wisconsin statute that allows courts to expunge certain conviction records of youthful offenders, Wis. Stat. § 973.015, provides that the court must make its decision about whether to expunge at the time of sentencing, conditioned upon the defendant successfully completing his or her sentence.

Often, young defendants receive a probationary term for crimes that are eligible for expungement (all misdemeanors, as well as certain felonies in the lower levels of severity). Prior case law has established that, although expungement is conditional upon successful completion of probation in this situation, the court may not defer ruling on the expungement request.

In State v. Hemp, the Wisconsin Supreme Court clarified that expungement occurs automatically if the statutory conditions are met, and that a defendant is not required after completing probation to apply to the sentencing court for entry of the expungement order. Importantly, the court also provided some guidance regarding the legal effect of expungement that will be of interest to job applicants who have had a previous conviction expunged.

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“Decades-long Arrest Wave Vexes Employers”

The Wall Street Journal has been running a well-researched series by Gary Fields and John Emschwiller on the consequences of mass conviction.  The installment last week (“Decades-long arrest wave vexes employers”) describes the dilemma facing employers caught between legal limitations on who they can hire and legal obligations to be fair. Hiring the most capable workers seems a luxury most employers can’t afford.

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Discipline for schoolgirls differs by race and skin tone

The New York Times this morning describes data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights showing that African-American girls tend to face more serious school discipline than white girls.  “For all the attention placed on problems that black boys face in terms of school discipline and criminal justice, there is increasing focus on the way those issues affect black girls as well.”  Black girls who get in trouble at school are also more frequently referred to the criminal justice system, where they can incur a criminal record that sticks with them into adulthood.

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Guess who’s driving for Uber

The background checking policies of Uber and other ride-sharing companies like Lyft and Sidecar are again in the news, after an Uber driver with an extensive criminal record allege1418261730022.cacheddly raped a female passenger in New Delhi.  Other horror stories of cab rides from hell with these popular “taxi aggregators” are surfacing.  The New York Times reports that background check requirements for taxi drivers vary widely by jurisdiction, but are “generally more rigorous” than the sketchy services used by Uber and its competitors, and “usually include searches of private databases like F.B.I. records.”  (Note to self:  Must inform the “paper of record” that the FBI records system is not a “private database.”)

Uber et al. have so far successfully resisted most legislative efforts to require them to perform particular kinds of background checks using particular kinds of background checkers, using the good offices of well-connected lobbyists to avoid this annoying speed bump on their road to a public offering.  But episodes like the New Delhi rape, and lawsuits for misleading consumers about the kinds of checks they do, may bring them around to a more responsible position. Read more

“One Strike and You’re Out:” Center for American Progress reports on criminal records policy

CAPREPORTEarlier this week, the Center for American Progress published a new report on the effect of the proliferation of criminal records in a nation of mass incarceration and criminalization. The report (“One Strike and You’re Out: How We Can Eliminate Barriers to Economic Security and Mobility for People with Criminal Records”) explores the debilitating effect that a criminal record – including records for relatively minor offenses and for arrests that did not result in a conviction – can have on an individual’s access to housing, public assistance, education, family stability, and, in turn, their prospects for economic stability. The report’s authors are Rebecca Vallas of the Center for American Progress’s Poverty and Prosperity Program, and Sharon Dietrich of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia (and of our own CCRC Board).

The report makes the point that the proliferation of criminal records, and the ease with which they can be accessed, harms not only individuals but society as a whole. The collateral consequences of a criminal record result in employment losses of $65 billion a year in GDP according to one study cited. Another study estimates that the national poverty rate would have dropped by 20 percent between 1980 and 2004 if not for mass incarceration and the accompanying criminal record crisis. The report notes that the war on drugs and the “criminalization of poverty” has resulted in a disproportionately high incidence of justice system contact in communities of color. Criminal records are thus both a cause of poverty and a consequence of poverty.

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California’s Proposition 47 and collateral consequences: Part II (reentry and restoration of rights)

Prop 47 and restoration of rights 

California’s recently enacted Proposition 47 fundamentally alters the landscape for a handful of lower-level felony offenses in California. As discussed by Jeffery Aaron in a previous post, Prop 47 reclassifies eight offenses as misdemeanors, including simple drug possession offenses and theft of less than $950. Anyone with a qualifying conviction, who also does not have a disqualifying prior, can now petition under Prop 47 to have a felony reclassifiedimages as a misdemeanor. The most significant and immediate relief will be for people who are incarcerated for qualifying low-level felonies and who are now eligible for resentencing and release. Public defender offices around the state are busy filing those petitions.

But, Prop 47 also allows two other populations to petition for reclassification of their qualifying felonies to misdemeanors: People who are under supervision but not incarcerated (on probation, parole, or post-release community supervision), and people whose sentences were completed long ago. This aspect of the new law presents good opportunities for tens of thousands of Californians, and not insignificant implementation challenges.

Simply by reclassifying certain offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, Prop 47 can undo some of the most serious collateral consequences.  It’s clear from our experience providing reentry legal services to thousands of clients over the years that people with felony, as opposed to misdemeanor, convictions face increased barriers to employment, housing, and full and meaningful community reintegration and citizenship. For example, people with a felony conviction, even a decades-old low-level offense, can never serve on a jury in California. For many people, Prop 47 will reverse this lifetime disenfranchisement and move them one step closer to full civic engagement.

But unfortunately, many of the statuary and extra-legal barriers to successful reentry that block people convicted of felonies also apply to people with convictions for misdemeanors and criminal infractions. Consequently, Prop 47 relief alone is not a cure-all for collateral consequences, and for most people it’s not even the most important petition they can file to overcome the statutory disabilities they face.  The following section describes how Prop 47 relief interacts with other California relief mechanisms. Read more

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