Author: CCRC Staff

Editorial staff of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center

Federal judge’s extraordinary expungement order will be appealed

Joe Palazzolo over at the Wall Street Journal blog reports that the Justice Department will appeal Judge John Gleeson’s extraordinary May 28 expungement order in U.S. v. Doe, described on this site earlier this month.  We reprint Joe’s piece in full below, since it highlights the disconnect between the Justice Department’s avowed concern with reentry and its evident lack of interest in providing relief from collateral consequences to people with federal convictions. The Justice Department spearheads the federal government’s efforts to help people convicted of crimes return to society after paying their dues, but a case in Brooklyn is putting its views to the test. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York signaled Friday that it will appeal a rare order by a federal judge expunging the fraud conviction of a health-care aide and mother of four who said her efforts to hold down a job have been sabotaged by her criminal record.

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Ban-the-box featured on PBS NewsHour

On June 17 the PBS NewsHour featured a debate over ban-the-box policies in hiring. Daryl Atkinson, an attorney with the Southern Coalition for Justice in Raleigh, North Carolina, presented the case in favor of eliminating threshold questions about criminal record on employment applications.  Elizabeth Milito of the National Federal of Independent Business argued the other side, claiming that the costs of ban-the-box for a small business “can be pretty steep.”

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Should guilty corporations avoid collateral consequences?

In the June 2 issue of the New York Law Journal, Robert J. Anello and Richard F. Albert argue that “criminal law concepts designed to punish human beings—bad boys and girls—are ill-suited to corporate beings.”  They point out that corporations convicted of crime are rarely required to live with the kind of collateral consequences that result in loss of livelihood and social stigma for individuals (“Convicted Corporations Aren’t Really Bad Boys“).   They describe how the government recently made “significant efforts to blunt the effects” of conviction on four major international banks that pleaded guilty to manipulation of foreign exchange rates, so that none of them ended up subject to “rules that would have restricted [their] ability to continue doing business in the United States.”  The banks are currently seeking a waiver of Labor Department rules that would otherwise bar them from dealing with pension and retirement plans, and the government has postponed sentencing pending the outcome of these efforts.  

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Should clemency substitute for the rule of law? “A Modest Proposal” says no

We cross-post a recent comment about the Obama clemency initiative from Professor Doug Berman’s Sentencing Law and Policy blog because it proposes to supplement the constitutional pardon power with a relief mechanism built into the legal system (there, a sentence reduction by the court rather than presidential commutation).  It reflects the institutional and practical concerns of Enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria, who proposed in 1764 that Clemency is a virtue which belongs to the legislator, and not to the executor of the laws; a virtue which ought to shine in the code, and not in private judgment. Beccaria’s view that clemency should “shine in the code” has a special resonance where collateral consequences are concerned since pardons have become so rare in recent years. Indeed, Judge John Gleeson might have invoked Beccaria when he expunged the conviction of a woman who was unable to find employment because of her criminal record.  We intend to keep arguing in this space for a statutory restoration remedy for the federal system, whatever form it may take.   

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Managing collateral consequences in the sentencing process

A new paper by CCRC editor Margaret Love describes how the newly revised sentencing articles of the Model Penal Code manage collateral collateral consequences by integrating them into the sentencing process.  The article, published in the Wisconsin Law Review, compares the new MPC provisions with the collateral consequences provisions of the original 1962 Code.  Here is the abstract: The debased legal status that results from a criminal conviction makes possible a regime of restrictions and exclusions that feels like punishment to those who are subject to it and looks like punishment to the community.  Policy makers are beginning to understand that the goal of reintegrating criminal offenders into society is not well served by a legal system that makes them permanently ineligible for many of its benefits and opportunities and effectively marks them as social outcasts.  Because courts have failed to address issues of severity and proportionality raised by punitive mandatory collateral penalties, and because legislatures have been unwilling to dial them back in any meaningful fashion, reformers have turned to the sentencing system to restore collateral consequences to an appropriate regulatory role.     One such reform proposal is the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code: Sentencing (MPC), which integrates […]

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