Finance & Banking | Collateral Consequences Resource Center

50-state survey of relief from sex offender registration

May 14, 2015 Margaret Love

We have prepared a new 50-state chart detailing the provisions for termination of the obligation to register as a sex offender in each state and under federal law. This project was inspired by Wayne Logan’s recent article in the Wisconsin Law Review titled “Database Infamia: Exit from the Sex Offender Registries,” discussed on this site on April 15. The original idea of the project was simply to present Professor Logan’s research in the same format as the other 50-state charts that are part of the NACDL Restoration of Rights Resource, supplementing it as necessary. But getting all of the state laws condensed into a few categories turned out to be a considerably more complex task than we imagined, in part because we had to fill in a lot of gaps, and in part because of the extraordinary variety and complexity of the laws themselves.

We present it here as a work in progress in the hope that practitioners and researchers in each state will review our work and give us comments to help us make the chart most helpful to them and to affected individuals. Read more

Forgiving v. forgetting: A new redemption tool

March 19, 2015 Eli Hager

The following thought-provoking piece about the growing popularity of judicial “certificates of good conduct” was first published in The Marshall Project (www.themarshallproject.org) a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. The “forgiving” approach to avoiding or mitigating collateral consequences is an important alternative to the “forgetting” approach advocated by proponents of expungement or sealing, which tend in any event to be limited to minor dated offenses or arrests not resulting in conviction.

Forgiving v. Forgetting:

For offenders seeking a new life, a new redemption tool.

In February of 2003, a much younger Barack Obama rose before the Illinois State Senate to introduce a new piece of legislation that, he said, contained a compromise. The bill would help job-seekers who had long ago been convicted of a nonviolent crime (or two, at most) overcome the barriers to employment that came with having a criminal history. But the bill would do so without expunging their records.

Instead, Obama’s bill would create a final, years-later stage on the timeline of these ex-offenders’ cases. They had already completed the stages of arrest, booking, indictment, plea bargaining or trial, sentencing, incarceration and/or probation. Now, ex-felons who had stayed crime-free for a few years would be eligible to come back to court and, in a full-blown hearing before a judge, attempt to “prove” that they had been rehabilitated.

When is a sex offender not a sex offender in Ohio?

March 12, 2015 CCRC Staff

The Ohio Supreme Court is considering whether a young man whose conviction requires him to register as a sex offender should be excused from this collateral consequence on grounds that it violates the state constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The transcript of the March 10 oral argument in Blankenship v. State of Ohio, Case no. 2014-0363, suggests that the Ohio high court may be poised to invalidate the mandatory sex offender classifications in Ohio law as applied to a 21-year-old who had a consensual sexual relationship with a 15-year-old. In 2011 the court ruled in State v. Williams that the state’s registration scheme is punitive and thus may not constitutionally be applied retroactively, so it would be a short step for the court to find that the mandatory registration requirement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in this case.

President promises a more “open” pardon process, more pardon grants

March 11, 2015 CCRC Staff

During a Town Hall in South Carolina on March 6, President Obama spoke for the second time in recent weeks about his intention to use his pardon power more generously in the final two years of his term.

Responding to a criminal defense attorney who asked what she could do to “increase the number of federal pardons,” the President explained that he was taking a “new approach” to pardons after receiving surprisingly few favorable recommendations from the Justice Department during his first term. He said he had asked the Attorney General to “open up” the pardon process, and to work with advocacy groups and public defenders to make people more aware of the availability of this relief:

California high court invalidates sex offender residency restrictions

March 10, 2015 Gabriel "Jack" Chin

In a remarkable, unanimous decision, the California Supreme Court held on March 2, 2015 that residence restrictions for sex offenders on parole were unconstitutional as applied. Although the case technically addressed the situation of four named plaintiffs in San Diego County, the decision calls into doubt the statute’s validity in the entire state.

In re Taylor tested the Sexual Predator Punishment and Control Act: Jessica’s Law, which, like many overwrought and unwise laws was enacted by initiative. Passed in 2006, it added Section 3003.5(b) to the Penal Code, making it “unlawful for any person for whom registration is required . . . to reside within 2000 feet of any public or private school, or park where children regularly gather.” In 2010, in an earlier stage of the case, the Court rejected claims brought by that the law was invalid on its face because it was unconstitutionally retroactive under California law, or because it violated state or federal prohibitions on ex post facto laws. However, the plaintiffs pursued the argument that the law was unconstitutional as applied; the trial court, California Court of Appeals, and Supreme Court agreed.

Putting teeth in Heller’s promise for people with a conviction: Second Amendment litigation round-up

February 26, 2015 Alan Gura

Alan Gura describes in this post recent efforts to persuade federal courts that people who have lost their firearms rights by virtue of a criminal conviction may be entitled to claim the protections of the Second Amendment. Alan himself has spearheaded this litigation for the Second Amendment Foundation, following up his Supreme Court victories in D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago. While successes have to date involved civil rights actions in behalf of people with dated non-violent convictions, these precedents may eventually find their way into felon-in-possession and related prosecutions. They also may portend, like the cases invalidating retroactive registration requirements, a greater willingness by courts to limit the scope of categorical collateral consequences that are considered unreasonable and unfair. Ed.

New York certificate scheme found inaccessible and ineffective

February 23, 2015 CCRC Staff

The certificate system for restoring rights after conviction in New York no longer serves its intended purposes, according to an investigation by City Limits. The problem is that Certificates of Relief from Disabilities (CRD) are supposed to be a means to rehabilitation for people sentenced to probation, but the judges authorized to issue them see them (in the words of one public defender) “as a gold star, as a thing you get after you’ve been rehabilitated.” The Parole Board appears similarly Read more

President promises more pardons (we think)

February 11, 2015 CCRC Staff

In a wide-ranging interview with Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith posted on February 11, President Obama was asked about the employment difficulties faced by young black men with a felony record. His response suggests that he may be interested in addressing through his pardon power the problems faced by people with federal convictions seeking restoration of rights and status, as he addressed them through law-making as a member of the Illinois legislature. This in turn suggests to us that the Justice Department may now be engaged, at the President’s direction, in a more proactive consideration of applications for a full presidential pardon. We post the exchange in full, so our readers can judge its import for themselves: Read more

Ohio pardons provide “only forgiveness, not forgetfulness”

January 29, 2015 Margaret Love

On January 28, 2015, the Ohio Supreme Court settled an issue it has toyed with for several years, relating to the inherent power of courts to seal criminal records. In State v. Radcliff, a closely divided court held that judicial power to seal a conviction record, including the record of a conviction that has been pardoned, is limited by law. In Ohio, there is no statutory basis for sealing a pardoned conviction as there is in many (though not most) states. The majority evidently found this conclusion an unhappy one, lamenting that “until the General Assembly acts, we are left with the understanding that a pardon provides only forgiveness, not forgetfulness.”

“Only forgiveness.” Is pardon then such a second class prize? What makes an official determination of the recipient’s good character by the state’s highest elected official so much less attractive an option for mitigating the adverse consequences of conviction than pretending it never occurred? If the answer is that the American people are relentlessly unforgiving, we clearly have some national soul-searching to do.

As will come clear from the following discussion, I do not share the Radcliff majority’s evident belief that a pardon is worth little unless it results in a court expunging the record of the pardoned conviction (and presumably the pardon itself).

Expungement resources now online from Papillon Foundation

January 26, 2015 CCRC Staff

Most people with a criminal record have a general understanding of the value of expunging or sealing their criminal records. However, figuring out how to actually obtain such relief in a particular jurisdiction, and understanding its specific effects, is not so easy. The Papillon Foundation aims to change that by offering practical internet-based information about the process for obtaining expungement and sealing in all 50 states. We spoke with the Foundation’s founder Alan Courtney not long ago to find out more about how the Foundation helps people clean up their record and take charge of their past. Read more

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Collateral Consequences Resource Center

Collateral Consequences of Criminal Conviction and Restoration of Rights: News, Commentary, and Tools

Category: Finance & Banking