Search Results for: expungement

Restoration of Rights Project: State-specific guides to restoration of rights, pardon, expungement, sealing & certificates of relief

Federal / Puerto Rico / Virgin Islands Federal | Read the Full Profile |  Summary: Loss & restoration of civil/firearms rights Read more Pardon policy & practice  Read more Expungement, sealing & other record relief Read more Criminal record in employment & licensing Read more | Return to Top | Alabama  | Read the Full Profile | Summary: Loss & restoration of civil/firearms rights Read more […]

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Expungement, Sealing & Set-Aside of Convictions: A National Survey

We are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a national survey of the various legal mechanisms that exist in each state to restore rights and opportunities after arrest or conviction. Titled “The Many Roads from Reentry to Reintegration,” the report revises and updates the survey CCRC originally published in the summer of 2020.  Like that earlier report, it includes grades for each state in nine different categories of relief, and an overall ranking of the states according to the efficacy of their combined restoration measures. Those who are familiar with the rankings in our 2020 report will find that since then many states have improved their position substantially (mostly at the higher end of the ranking scale, with several impressive exceptions) and many have not (mostly at its lower end).

We hope that this report will allow us to take stock of the extraordinary things that legislatures across the country have been able to accomplish in just the past 18 months, enacting a total of more than 250 separate laws to restore the franchise, clear criminal records, and ensure fair consideration in employment and licensing.  We expect to publish the entire new “Many Roads” report next week, along with a new version of our Reintegration Report Card that showcases the states that have made the most progress and suggests how each state may improve its ranking for the next report.

Today we are publishing an excerpt from the new “Many Roads” report on two of its nine categories: record clearing for felony and misdemeanor convictions. Each state is graded separately in the two categories, although the map that is included midway through this post combines them, as they are combined in the 50-state chart from the Restoration of Rights Project. Record clearing for non-conviction records is covered in a separate section, and will be published here in the next few days.

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Expungement, Sealing & Set-Aside of Convictions: A National Survey

Tens of millions of Americans have been convicted of a felony or misdemeanor.[1] This number has grown substantially in the last four decades as a result of the policies of “mass incarceration” and so-called “war on crime,” with disproportionate impacts on Black and Brown people.[2] The vast network of collateral consequences that can flow from a conviction in the modern era has been described as a new form of “civil death.”[3] In addition to formal consequences imposed by law and rule, widespread dissemination of criminal records online and in background checks operates as a form of continuing “digital punishment.”[4]  In recent years collateral consequences of a less formal variety have extended even to mere arrest records not followed by conviction.[5] The American way of dealing with a person’s criminal history is unburdened with the considerations of privacy, utility, and basic fairness that have shaped European systems.[6]

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50-State Comparison: Expungement, Sealing & Other Record Relief

Section 1 categorizes jurisdictions by the availability of relief for convictions. Section 2 categorizes jurisdictions with automatic record clearing laws. Section 3 categorizes jurisdictions by the relief process for non-convictions. Section 4 lists jurisdictions with judicial certificates of relief. Section 5 provides a 50-state chart comparing record relief law across jurisdictions. Section 6 provides state-by-state summaries of record relief law, […]

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National maps on expungement, pardoning, and voting rights restoration

The Collateral Consequences Resource Center is pleased to unveil six new maps that visualize the Center’s research on national laws and policies for restoring rights and opportunities to people with a record. These maps are now available below and on the 50-state comparison pages (expungement, sealing & other record relief; civil rights; and pardoning). Each state can be clicked for a detailed summary of state law and policy.

The Center will keep these maps updated, along with the rest of the Restoration of Rights Project, with future changes to the law.

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Access Barriers to Felony Expungement in Utah

Currently, 39 states authorize expungement or sealing of at least some felony convictions.[i]  Recent research shows that only a small percentage of eligible individuals actually complete the court petition process required to obtain such relief, which is frequently hard to understand and usually burdensome, costly, and time-consuming.[ii]

Ideally, the most efficient way to overcome these barriers would be to make sealing automatic, dispensing with the requirement of individual application entirely.  However, the move toward automatic sealing is still in its early stages, and we anticipate that in many states, at least in the near future, petition-based sealing will remain a primary method for clearing certain records, particularly felony convictions.  Accordingly, it is important to identify and minimize barriers to petition-based relief wherever possible.  That is the purpose of this project.

In February 2021, we published an analysis of strengths and weakness of the felony record clearance process in Illinois by Beth Johnson and her partners in the Rights and Restoration Law Group (RRLG).  We are now pleased to present the second study in this series, a review of Utah’s felony expungement scheme by Noella Sudbury.

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Dozens of new expungement laws already enacted in 2021

This year is turning out to be another remarkable year for new record relief enactments. In just the first six months of 2021, 25 states enacted no fewer than 51 laws authorizing sealing or expungement of criminal records, with another 5 states enrolling 11 bills that await a governor’s signature. Three of these states authorized sealing of convictions for the first time, seven states passed laws (or enrolled bills) providing authority for automatic sealing, and a number of additional states substantially expanded the reach of their existing expungement laws.

This post hits the highlights of what may well be the most extraordinary six-month period in the extraordinary modern period of criminal record reform that begin in 2013.  The only closely comparable period is the first six months of 2018, when 11 states enacted major reforms limiting consideration of criminal records in occupational licensing.  Further details of the laws mentioned below can be found in the relevant state profiles from the Restoration of Rights Project.

(An earlier post noted new occupational licensing laws in 2021, and subsequent ones will describe significant extensions of the right to vote so far this year, and summarize the more than 100 record reforms enacted to date.) Read more

Oregon’s expungement statute gets a much-needed overhaul

– Following George Floyd’s murder, NIKE and Metropolitan Public Defender, Oregon’s largest trial-level public defense service provider, became unlikely partners to improve Oregon’s expungement statute.

Oregon has allowed expungement of certain criminal records since 1972, but the law and process are so complicated and costly that only 5.5% of eligible residents ultimately obtain relief.  The statute is replete with exceptions, convictions block other convictions and non-convictions, the least serious convictions have a lengthy “look back” period of conviction-free conduct that regularly results in a 10-year waiting period, and non-person class B felonies have the longest waiting period in the nation (20 years). Even non-convictions are subject to the same 10-year look-back period as convictions, plus an additional three-year period of no other arrests, dismissals or acquittals.

The impact of Oregon’s dysfunctional system is felt most severely by its BIPOC community who are more likely to be arrested, charged and convicted.  Black Oregonians are almost four times as likely to have a criminal record as their white counterparts.  See Paperprisons.org.

Metropolitan Public Defender and NIKE’s pro bono group, frustrated by the complex law and process, were inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder.  They challenged themselves to create tangible change and co-wrote the proposal that became Senate Bill 397, with input from CCRC. Collaboration with prosecutors led to bipartisan support in the Oregon legislature (Senate 24-5, House 57-1) for the bill, which Governor Kate Brown is expected to sign. It will be effective January 1, 2022.

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Marijuana legalization and expungement in early 2021

By Collateral Consequences Resource Center & Drug Enforcement and Policy Center Staff Spring 2021 Digging into the groundbreaking criminal reforms enacted this year as part of marijuana legalization Early 2021 was an unprecedented period for policymaking at the intersection of marijuana legalization and criminal record reform. Between February and April, four states enacted legislation legalizing recreational marijuana. In conjunction with […]

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Access Barriers to Felony Expungement: The Case of Illinois

Currently, 33 states authorize the expungement or sealing of at least some felony convictions.i However, recent research has shown that only a small percentage of eligible individuals actually complete the court petition process required to obtain this relief in most jurisdictions.ii In the fall of 2020, as an outgrowth of its work surveying record relief laws in the 50 states, the Collateral Consequences Resource Center (CCRC) decided to take a closer look at barriers that prevent people with felony convictions from accessing relief intended to benefit them.

Ideally, the most efficient way to overcome access barriers would be to make sealing automatic, dispensing with the requirement of filing individual petitions. However, the move toward automatic sealing is in its early stages,iii and we anticipate that petitions will remain the primary way to clear felony conviction records in most states for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, it is important to minimize barriers to petition-based relief at every level.

In order to minimize barriers, they must first be identified and documented. We have therefore begun work on a project to analyze barriers to petition-based sealing of felonies in a number of different states. This will hopefully encourage those states to reform their process to retain only substantive and procedural requirements that are truly necessary from a policy perspective, and to shift burdens now placed on individual applicants to the government wherever practicable. At the same time, the revealed difficulty of accessing petition-based relief on an equitable basis would be a strong incentive to consider automation, and the costs and benefits of each process could more easily be compared.

As a preliminary step toward launching this project, we collaborated with Beth Johnson and her partners in the Rights and Restoration Law Group (RRLG) to develop a survey instrument that collects information about access barriers to felony expungement across four domains: (1) resource and knowledge; (2) eligibility; (3) process; and (4) effectiveness. We tested our survey instrument with practitioners from several states. Beth and her team took the survey for their home state of Illinois and analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the state’s record-sealing system.iv

We are publishing the RRLG Illinois report that follows as a pilot for additional state-specific studies. It provides detailed descriptions of the Illinois system’s strengths and weaknesses in the four areas identified above, and makes recommendations for reform. RRLG’s survey responses are in the appendix.

The Illinois report is available as a PDF here, and included in this post below.

We hope to be able to broaden this project to work with practitioners from additional states to complete the survey and write up case studies, on the basis of which we could recommend state-specific reforms as well as more general best practices. In addition to this project, we have been collaborating with Jessica K. Steinberg, director of the Prisoner & Reentry Clinic at GW Law, on an initiative in which the clinic has created a survey tool and conducted data collection on pro se access barriers to felony expungement in 34 states, with a white paper planned for later this year.

In the meantime, here are links to the survey questions used for this report. We invite anyone interested to complete it, to help us gather data for this undertaking:

Part I. Resource & Knowledge Barriers: https://forms.gle/MxRYtcpvMahYybcM7

Part II. Eligibility Barriers: https://forms.gle/RHQo92DedtddqyrJ7

Part III. Process Barriers: https://forms.gle/nAjUHKwKjmbKzXMZ9

Part IV. Effectiveness Barriers: https://forms.gle/t2iNh1RPJDPLDkXm7

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