Collateral Consequences Resource Center

Diversion pleas qualify as convictions under federal background check law

July 22, 2019 CCRC Staff

The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) prohibits companies engaged in criminal background screening from reporting records of arrests that are more than seven years old. But since the 1990’s, there has been no time limit on reporting “records of convictions of crimes.” See 15 U.S.C. § 1681c(a)(2) and (5). It might reasonably be assumed that criminal cases terminated in favor of the accused without a conviction (such as uncharged arrests, acquittals and dismissed charges) would fall into the first category, and so would not be reportable after seven years. But we were recently alerted to a decision of the 7th Circuit from April that defined the term “conviction” in FCRA broadly to include any disposition involving a guilty plea, even if the charges are dismissed pursuant to a diversionary program with no resulting conviction under state law.

In Aldaco v. Rentgrow, a background screening company reported to Rafaela Aldaco’s prospective landlord that she had pleaded guilty to a battery charge twenty years earlier. As a result, the landlord rejected Aldaco’s rental application. Aldaco conceded her guilty plea, but pointed out that the court had deferred proceedings while she successfully completed a brief supervision sentence, after which the court had dismissed the battery charge without a judgment of conviction under Illinois law. She sued the background screener, arguing that reporting her dated non-conviction disposition violated FCRA’s seven-year bar.

The court of appeals ruled against Aldaco, holding that the term “conviction” in FCRA must be defined by federal rather than state law, and that a guilty plea is all it takes to convert a state non-conviction disposition into one that qualifies as a conviction under federal law. The leading Supreme Court case in this area is Dickerson v. New Banner Institute, 460 U.S. 103 (1983), which held that an Iowa man whose charges had been diverted and expunged after a guilty plea nonetheless had a “conviction” for purposes of the federal felon-in-possession law. (Congress later revised the federal firearms law to incorporate state relief mechanisms into that law’s definition of conviction. See 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(20).) The term “conviction” in other federal laws has been similarly interpreted to include state non-conviction dispositions that include a guilty plea. See United States v. Gomez, 24 F.3d 924 (7th Cir. 1994)(“prior conviction” under § 841(b)(1) includes a plea to a probationary sentence that did not result in a final adjudication); Cleaton v. Department of Justice, 839 F.3d 1126, 1130 (Fed. Cir. 2016)(5 U.S.C. § 7371(b) requires that “[a]ny law enforcement officer who is convicted of a felony shall be removed from employment,” and this includes a guilty plea simpliciter); Harmon v. Teamsters Local 371, 832 F.2d 976 (7th Cir. 1987)(29 U.S.C. § 504(a) prohibits persons “convicted of” various felonies from serving as an officer, director, consultant, or in other leadership roles in labor organizations, and the term is defined by federal law and includes deferred judgments). These decisions suggest that absent a contrary indication from Congress, federal courts will count diversionary pleas as convictions under federal law, including FCRA.

Short of revising FCRA itself, it would appear that there are two ways to ensure that state non-conviction dispositions are not included in background checks as federal “convictions” after seven years. One is to eliminate the requirement of a guilty plea from diversionary dispositions. The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines show the way: the provisions on criminal history distinguish between “[d]iversion from the judicial process without a finding of guilt” which is not counted as part of an individual’s criminal history for sentencing purposes, and “a diversionary disposition resulting from a finding or admission of guilt, or a plea of nolo contendere” which counts toward criminal history. See U.S.S.G. § 4A1.2(f). Therefore, if states want their diversion programs to achieve their stated goals of avoiding convictions in appropriate cases, they should consider phasing out plea requirements.

The second way to avoid having a diversionary disposition reported as a conviction is to ensure that diversion includes sealing or expungement of the record. There is a growing body of caselaw interpreting FCRA’s requirements that data be both accurate and up to date to prohibit reporting sealed or expunged convictions. See Sharon Dietrich’s analysis of the issue for CCRC here. In fact, it appears that Aldaco herself may have been eligible to have her record expunged under Illinois law, though there is no indication that she sought this relief. While expungement probably would not have mattered to the federal court’s holding on the meaning of “conviction,” it might have given Aldaco an alternative FCRA ground for challenging the background screener’s report.

This post is part of a series for CCRC’s non-conviction records project, a study of the public availability and use of non-conviction records – including arrests that are never charged, charges that are dismissed, deferred dispositions, and acquittals.

Commercializing criminal records and the privatization of punishment

July 12, 2019 Gabriel "Jack" Chin

The deeply ingrained, indeed, constitutionally protected, U.S. tradition of the public trial and public records has led to a system where there are few restrictions on public access to criminal record information. Europe, by contrast, is more willing to limit the press in service of important goals such as reintegration of people with convictions. Alessandro Corda and Sarah E. Lageson have published an important new study on how this works on the ground. Disordered Punishment: Workaround Technologies of Criminal Records Disclosure and The Rise of A New Penal Entrepreneurialism, in the British Journal of Criminology, explains how these traditions play out practically in the United States and Europe.

The paper notes that systematically in the United States, and increasingly in Europe, private actors are “extracting, compiling, aggregating and repackaging records from different sources;” as the authors put it, they are “producing” not merely reproducing criminal records. In so doing they expand the reach of punishment. To the extent that any random Joe or Jane can obtain criminal records, then potential associates can make decisions based on records, accurate or inaccurate, showing convictions or even mere arrests or charges which were dismissed, diverted, or led to an acquittal.

The case study of the United States notes that employers, landlords, universities and civic organizations often engage in criminal background screening, but these uses are regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. However, internet databases scrape and buy official and semi-official sources, criminal, financial, licensing, and many others, and make compilations available for a fee. These “people search” services, thus far, have successfully claimed they are mere information aggregators not subject to FCRA: “these websites provide disclaimers warning users they are not to use the information for any sort of decision-making (such as hiring or housing decisions) but rather can only use the information for review of public records in an information-gathering spirit.” One wonders: How often might employers, landlords and other decisionmakers skip official FCRA reports and go to an unregulated, perhaps cheaper, web search? Since the chances of getting caught and punished seem small, one might assume it happens a lot. In addition, the quality of this data is sometimes poor; are such things as expungements and set-asides pursuant to state law are reliably added to the databases?

The result is what the authors term “disordered punishment,” imposition of punishment is not restricted to the state: “Employers, insurers and landlords—but also neighbours, acquaintances and potential partners—ultimately determine whether impactful consequences are imposed and, if so, with what magnitude.” As a result, the consequences of a crime or an accusation become unpredictable. In some cases, the consequences will be vastly disproportionate to the underlying conduct, for example, when a serious charge has been made but dropped because authorities believe the accused is innocent or even prove the guilt of someone else. In such cases, decisionmakers may still conclude that looking for another tenant, employee, or date is the safest course.

The paper does not propose solutions, but the CCRC project on non-conviction records may lead to some reforms that could mitigate the problem. Perhaps the government should not make some records available at all, perhaps some entities now not subject to FCRA should be included, and at a minimum the law should be set up so that if a conviction has been subject to some sort of set-aside, that fact also must be disclosed.

New restoration laws take center stage in second quarter of 2019

July 9, 2019 CCRC Staff

State legislatures across the country are moving quickly and creatively to repair some of the damage done by the War on Crime, which left a third of the adult U.S. population with a criminal record. In the second quarter of 2019, 26 states have enacted an eye-popping total of 78 separate new laws aimed at addressing the disabling effects of a record. Coupled with the laws enacted in the first quarter, the total for the first half of 2019 is 97 new laws enacted by 36 states. By way of comparison, in all of 2018 there were 61 new restoration laws enacted in 32 states and two territories, which was then a record.

Much of the new legislation this quarter is quite significant. Some states made their first substantial effort in decades to deal with the problems presented by record-based discrimination, while others refined and extended reforms enacted in the recent past. Some states enacted multiple laws dealing with the same restoration issue (Texas stands out with five laws on occupational licensing alone), and some dealt with multiple issues in one law (New York dealt with no fewer than twelve separate issues in a 2020 budget bill). Many of the specific laws enacted in the second quarter were anticipated by laws enacted by other states in the first.

As in the past, state lawmakers this quarter focused most of their attention on facilitating access to record-clearing, although a significant number of new laws regulate consideration of criminal record in the occupational licensing process. Another important area of progress is in restoration of voting rights. Other matters addressed by new laws include driver’s licenses and firearms; diversionary dispositions; and immigration consequences. Surprisingly few of the new laws deal directly with employment, perhaps on the assumption that limited access to criminal records will also limit employment discrimination, at least where a background check is not mandated by law (frequently an exception to sealing). Only one law enacted during this past quarter took a step backward to restrict an existing restoration measure (a significant development in Florida in the area of voting rights).

The new laws also display a remarkable variety, indicating either that the spirit of experimentation is alive and well in the States, or that States are desperate for law reform guidance, or both. Meanwhile, in stark contrast to this prolific state law-making, Congress has not attempted to deal with the problem of reintegration for more than a decade—either by reducing federal collateral consequences or by restoring rights to people with federal convictions.

Below, we describe some of the more significant new laws by category, covering voting rights, record-sealing, occupational licensing, immigration, and what for want of a better term we call “odds and ends.” For those interested in further details about the new laws, we have described and analyzed them in the state profiles and summary charts of the Restoration of Rights Project. (In order to access the full analysis of the new laws in the RRP, you must clink the link on the “summary” sheet labeled “Read the Full Profile.”)

Colorado limits immigration consequences of a criminal record

July 2, 2019 Kelly Cunningham

Colorado joins other states this session that passed legislation to avoid federal immigration consequences of state criminal matters. The new Colorado laws—SB 30 and HB 1148—work at different stages of criminal proceedings to protect people from possible deportation: SB 30 remedies past wrongs by vacating unconstitutional guilty pleas, and SB 1148 will prevent future deportations resulting from potential one-year sentences.

On May 28, Colorado enacted SB 30, which went into effect immediately and helps ensure that when a person is offered a non-conviction diversion, it is not treated as a conviction for immigration purposes. In many states, people facing criminal charges are offered the chance to avoid a conviction by agreeing to a type of diversion called deferred adjudication. They plead guilty and complete a period of probation, after which the plea is withdrawn and charges are dismissed. Sounds good right? Not for a non-citizen. In that case, federal law treats this arrangement as a conviction—sufficient to initiate deportation proceedings. See 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(48)(A); § 1227(a)(2). However, such a plea may be unconstitutional if a person was not properly advised of these immigration consequences. See Padilla v. Kentucky, 559 U.S. 356 (2010).

The new Colorado law provides procedures for courts to vacate an unconstitutional guilty plea where it has already been withdrawn and the charges dismissed. See Colo. Rev. Stat. § 18-1-410.5. Read more

“Wealth-based penal disenfranchisement”

July 1, 2019 CCRC Staff

This is the title of a study by UCLA law professor Beth Colgan, published in the Vanderbilt Law Review, in which she documents how every state that disenfranchises people based upon criminal conviction also conditions restoration of the vote for at least some people upon their ability to pay. In some states this is because the law requires people to pay fines, fees, restitution and other court costs before they can vote. Even in the states that restore the vote immediately upon release from prison, “wealth-based penal disenfranchisement” may occur through policies applied by parole and probation authorities. Colgan proposes that such laws and policies can be challenged on Equal Protection grounds, arguing that felony disenfranchisement should be considered not as a civil rights deprivation but as punishment. She argues that the test developed by the Supreme Court in cases involving disparate treatment between rich and poor in criminal justice practices, should operate as a flat prohibition against “the use of the government’s prosecutorial power in ways that effectively punish one’s financial circumstances unless no other alternative response could satisfy the government’s interest in punishing the disenfranchising offense.”

Colgan’s article is particularly relevant in light of Florida’s recent enactment of a law that seems to frustrate the will of the 64% of Florida voters who acted last fall by ballot initiative to provide relief from one of the country’s strictest disenfranchisement provisions. On Friday, shortly after the Governor signed into law a bill conditioning restoration of the vote on payment of all court-imposed debt, a group of civil rights organizations filed suit in federal court, claiming that the new law violates the Constitution in several ways, most premised on the notion that disenfranchisement constitutes punishment. Among other things, the suit argues that “the Fourteenth Amendment’s doctrine of fundamental fairness prevents states from punishing individuals if they fail to do the impossible—satisfy legal financial obligations when they do not have the means to do so,” and that the new law violates Equal Protection in discriminating between those who are able to pay and those who are not. We intend to follow this litigation all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary.

Here is the Colgan article’s abstract: Read more

CCRC to hold roundtable on criminal records at U. Michigan Law School

June 28, 2019 CCRC Staff

We are pleased to announce that we are convening a roundtable meeting in August 2019, hosted by the University of Michigan Law School, to develop a model law on access to and use of criminal records, specifically in cases that do not result in a conviction.

In March, we began a major study of the public availability and use of these non-conviction records – including arrests that are never charged, charges that are dismissed, deferred and diversionary dispositions, and acquittals. Law enforcement agencies and courts frequently make these records available to the public allowing widespread dissemination on the internet, both directly and through private for-profit databases. Their appearance in background checks can lead to significant discrimination against people who have never been convicted of a crime, and result unfairly in barriers to employment, housing, education, and many other opportunities. Research has shown that limiting public access to criminal records through mechanisms like sealing and expungement increases the earning ability of those who receive this relief, which in turn benefits their families and communities.

The problems of access and use are not limited to private actors: a recent court decision in New York suggests that police departments in some jurisdictions make operational use of sealed non-conviction records even when the law prohibits it.

Survey of law enforcement access to sealed non-conviction records

June 26, 2019 Margaret Love

As part of our non-conviction records project, we have researched what state laws provide on law enforcement agency access to and use of sealed or expunged non-conviction records for routine law enforcement purposes. This issue is particularly salient in light of an ongoing lawsuit against the New York Police Department in which a New York state court found that the NYPD’s routine use and disclosure of sealed arrest information—without securing a court order—violates New York’s sealing statute.

Looking across the country, we found an almost even split on this issue: exactly half the states either do not allow law enforcement access to sealed records for routine law enforcement activity, or condition law enforcement access on a court order (as in New York) or formal written request. Specifically, we identified 25 states and two territories that appear to limit law enforcement agency access to and/or use of non-conviction records, either absolutely (12 states and two territories), or without a court order (11 states) or formal written request to the state custodian of records for a specified purpose (two states). The other 25 states, plus two territories, the District of Columbia and the Federal system, exempt law enforcement agencies generally from sealing or expungement laws, or in a few cases have no law authorizing sealing of non-conviction records (American Samoa, the Federal system, and Wisconsin).

Note a couple of things about the way we conducted this research. First, our results apply only to records that do not result in a conviction (though in many states the answer is the same for records that do), and we classified them according to their apparent application to law enforcement operations (some states allow law enforcement agency access for employment and certification purposes). There are a handful of states that bar law enforcement agency access but allow access by prosecutors, both generally (NC) and in specific situations (AR, KS), and we classified these as barring law enforcement access, because the possibility of police access to records through prosecutors is not the kind of unregulated direct access at issue in the New York litigation.

The second thing to note is that our results say nothing about how easy or hard it is to get a non-conviction record sealed or expunged, or who is eligible for this relief. For example, of the states whose laws bar access, New York offers sealing of non-conviction records right at disposition as a routine matter, with the burden on the prosecutor to show why sealing isn’t appropriate (and it is a high bar). Other states in the “no access” or “court order” categories (e.g. Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia) require a defendant to file a separate civil petition after an eligibility waiting period, disqualify based on prior record, require a hearing at which the petitioner has the burden of showing why relief should be granted, and even impose civil filing fees.

Our classification tells a bit more about the scope or effect of sealing/expungement relief in each state more generally, since states that “delete” or “erase” non-conviction records are more likely to specifically bar law enforcement agency access than states that merely limit public access to the record. But even states that provide some public access (e.g., by licensing boards) may also bar access for law enforcement functions (e.g., KS). (Further information about the effect of sealing or expungement relief in each state may be found in the Restoration of Rights Project profiles.)

Our state-by-state research follows.

“Invisible Stripes: The Problem of Youth Criminal Records”

June 8, 2019 CCRC Staff

This is the title of a paper by Professor Judith McMullen of Marquette University Law School. Professor McMullen points out that “the efforts of today’s young people to ‘go straight’ are hampered by nearly unlimited online access to records of even the briefest of encounters with law enforcement, even if those encounters did not result in conviction.” She argues that “we need to restrict access to and use of information about contacts that offenders under the age of 21 have had with the criminal justice system.”

CCRC’s forthcoming study of how jurisdictions manage non-conviction records underscores the points made in this article. It may come as a surprise to many that few jurisdictions automatically limit public access to and use of non-conviction records, and in fact many facilitate both through mass on-line posting of records – including arrests that never result in charges. Even states that authorize courts to seal or expunge non-conviction records frequently impose daunting barriers to this relief, including financial barriers. A decision of the Iowa Supreme Court last month, upholding a law conditioning expungement of dismissed charges on an indigent defendant’s payment of court-appointed attorney fees, vividly illustrates this access to justice problem that squarely frustrates efforts at reintegration. There are a number of studies underway of the adverse effect of court debt on reentry, but none that we know of linking court debt to the operation of “clean slate” laws.

Administration withdraws proposal to require federal job-seekers to disclose diversions

May 30, 2019 CCRC Staff

The Washington Post reports that the White House has directed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to drop its proposal to expand the types of criminal records that must be disclosed by applicants seeking federal jobs and contracting work. OPM’s proposal, which we described in March, would have required applicants for federal jobs and contracting work to disclose participation in pretrial diversion programs in the last 7 years.

In March, we launched our non-conviction records project, a major study of the public availability and use of non-conviction records – including arrests that are never charged, charges that are dismissed, deferred and diversionary dispositions, and acquittals. The appearance of these records in background checks can lead to significant discrimination against people who have never been convicted of a crime, and result unfairly in barriers to employment, housing, education, and many other opportunities. Our letter opposing the OPM proposal cited our research on diversions and pointed out that while “state lawmakers, judges, and prosecutors favor diversionary dispositions in appropriate cases to help people avoid the restrictions and stigma of a conviction, OPM’s proposal disfavors them by treating them like convictions.”

We are pleased to see the administration quash this ill-advised proposal, in the face of opposition from advocates on the left and right, lawmakers from both parties, and prosecutors and public defenders. At a time of growing consensus in Congress and the states about the need to prioritize rehabilitation and reintegration for individuals with a criminal record, the federal government should be moving to reduce the collateral consequences of diversion (as Indiana and Wisconsin did in 2018 when they prohibited licensing boards from considering arrests not resulting in conviction, or California and Nevada did in 2017 when they prohibited employers from considering an applicant’s successful completion of diversion).

While every state legislature has in some way addressed the problem of reintegration since 2012, Congress has not enacted any laws dealing with the problems presented by collateral consequences for more than a decade. Now is the time for federal action in support of reintegration, as the withdrawal of the OPM proposal evidently recognizes.

Should potentially severe collateral consequences trigger enhanced procedural protections?

May 24, 2019 CCRC Staff

In two recent law review articles, Professor Paul T. Crane of the University of Richmond School of Law proposes that courts and legislators—when deciding whether a criminal defendant is entitled to a particular procedural right—should take into account potential exposure to severe collateral consequences. The two articles together mark a major contribution to the literature. Much attention has focused on alleviating or eliminating collateral consequences after the criminal case is closed, via restoration of rights, clemency, expungement, and other forms of relief. Also, lawmakers, courts, and prosecutors have increasingly turned to diversions and deferred adjudications to avoid a conviction record in the first instance. However, far less attention has been paid to the procedural rights provided to criminal defendants facing potentially severe collateral consequences. As Crane points out, collateral consequences are “generally deemed irrelevant for determining what procedural safeguards must be afforded.”

In Crane’s first article, he argues that courts and legislatures ought to take into account a defendant’s exposure to potentially severe collateral consequences in determining whether procedural safeguards, such as the right to counsel and to a jury trial, apply. In his second article, he proposes a framework for determining when defendants may be entitled to enhanced procedural protections.

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