Author: CCRC Staff

Editorial staff of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center

Professional careers jeopardized by old charges

A local office of the Wisconsin State Public Defender recently assisted two former clients who encountered obstacles with their respective legal and medical careers (minor details have been changed to ensure client confidentiality).  These examples show that old criminal cases, even for relatively minor charges, can cause employment difficulties and frustrate professional advancement many years later.

The first former client recently passed an out-of-state bar examination, and he disclosed on his license application a 20-year-old Wisconsin misdemeanor charge.  When he called for assistance in interpreting the online court records, he learned (to his relief) that what he had always thought was a criminal conviction had actually been reduced to a non-criminal ordinance violation.  Although the original criminal charge remains accessible in Wisconsin’s court records, he was able to amend his license application to report that he does not have any criminal conviction record.  (It is not clear what effect a misdemeanor conviction would have had on his licensure, but now he won’t have to find out.) (more…)

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Collateral consequences of conviction in Greece

Collateral Consequences of Conviction in Greece[1]

by Dimitra Blitsa

1. Access to Greek Criminal Records 

In Greece, a criminal record is created for every adult[2] person who has been irrevocably convicted of a misdemeanor or a felony (i.e. by a decision not subject to an appeal before the Supreme Court). Unlike in the U.S. but consistent with continental European countries, a Greek criminal record does not contain arrest information. Individual criminal history records are considered “sensitive personal data.” Disclosure and access is restricted to protect the convicted person’s privacy and to promote rehabilitation. Although Greek court proceedings are open to the public, court records are not available for public inspection.

(more…)

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Copyright dispute roils federally-funded database of collateral consequences

Copyright-symbol-with-a-lockShould a compilation of collateral consequences mandated by federal law and prepared with federal funds be freely available to states and members of the public?  The Uniform Law Commission says yes, the American Bar Association says no.

In an article posted on May 18, the Wall Street Journal pulled back the curtain on an on-going dispute between the ULC and the ABA over copyright restrictions the ABA has imposed on data in the National Inventory of Collateral Consequences (NICCC).  The ULC is concerned that restrictions on access and use of the NICCC data are likely to stymie adoption of the Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act (UCCCA), which requires that states create their own inventories.  The ABA contends that the existence of other potentially conflicting databases would create undesirable confusion about the meaning of the law.  An excerpt from the WSJ piece (a companion to another article on collateral consequences published the same day), follows: (more…)

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Georgia high court extends Padilla to parole eligibility

The Supreme Court of Georgia has extended the doctrine of Padilla v. Kentucky to a failure to advise about parole eligibility.  In Alexander v. State, decided on May 11, a defendant sentenced to a 15-year prison term for child molestation sought to set aside his guilty plea on grounds that his defense counsel had not warned him that, as a recidivist, he would not be eligible for parole.  The Georgia high court agreed that this failure constituted deficient performance under the doctrine of Strickland v. Washington, overruling its 1999 precedent holding that the Sixth Amendment did not require a defense lawyer to advise a client about this “collateral consequence” of conviction. The Georgia court distinguished its 2010 post-Padilla decision declining to find a warning by the court necessary, finding a clear constitutional distinction between defense counsel’s Sixth Amendment obligation to advise a client considering a guilty plea and the court’s due process obligation to warn a defendant in the same situation.

At the same time, the court declined to approve a lower court’s earlier extension of Padilla to sex offender registration, reserving for another day the question whether this consequence is “a drastic measure” that is “intimately related” to the criminal case.  Most of the post-Padilla decisions involving parole eligibility have rested on the dubious pre-Padilla erroneous advice exception to the collateral consequences rule, an exception that the Alexander court firmly rejected.

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27 Senators urge Obama to “ban the box” in federal hiring

A group of 27 U.S. Senators have written to President Obama urging him to implement “fair chance” hiring in federal government employment.   The Senators — all Democrats, led by Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — asked the President to issue an executive order directing federal agencies and contractors to postpone inquiry into criminal records until a later point in the hiring process.  The so-called ban-the-box movement in the states has been gaining steam and has been largely bipartisan, with executive orders issued most recently in Georgia and Vermont.  Some of the largest employers in the country, including Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Koch Industries have also stopped asking about prior convictions at the beginning of the job application process.

The press release and letter are here.  A January 2015 report from the National Employment Law Project suggests that the details of a presidential executive order may be difficult to work out, given the decentralized nature of federal hiring and the applicability of formal background check requirements to a substantial number of federally-funded jobs.

 

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