UPDATED: 50-State Chart on Relief from Sex Offender Registration

We have completed an overhaul of our 50-State chart on relief from sex offender registration obligations, to bring it up to date and ensure that it is thorough and accurate.  This chart documents the duration of sex offender registration requirements, as well as legal mechanisms for early termination from such requirements. In conducting this review, we have identified a handful of states that have, since the chart was last revised in November 2017, expanded the availability of relief from sex offender registration requirements, including for people who have successfully completed diversionary dispositions, people with serious disabilities, and people who are registered based on out-of-state offenses.  These recent changes in the law, incorporated in the chart, are summarized below.

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Algorithms, Race, and Reentry: A Review of Sandra G. Mayson’s Bias In, Bias Out

In true Minority Report fashion, state actors are increasingly relying on algorithms to assess the risk a person will commit a future crime.  Unlike Minority Report, these algorithms simply estimate the likelihood of rearrests; they do not offer the absolute answer to future criminal behavior that condemned the defendant, Tom Cruise, in the 2002 action film.  Still, criminal justice actors are using many types of algorithmic risk assessments to inform their decisions in pre-trial investigations, bail recommendations and decisions, and post-trial sentencing and parole proceedings.  Sandra G. Mayson’s article[1], Bias In, Bias Out, published this year in the Yale Law Journal, explains how these algorithms could reflect and project past and present racial bias in the criminal justice system and elsewhere. At its core, an algorithm specifies individual traits that are correlated with crime commission.  If the data show that people of color are arrested more frequently, then the algorithm will predict more arrests for people of color.  In this sense, an accurate algorithm “holds a mirror to the past” by “distilling patterns in past data and projecting them into the future.”  Mayson provides an in-depth, yet easy-to-follow explanation of why race neutrality is unattainable when the base rates of […]

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Association of Prosecuting Attorneys joins Restoration of Rights Project as partner

The Collateral Consequences Resource Center is pleased to announce that the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA) has joined as a partner in our Restoration of Rights Project (RRP).  The APA is a membership organization of elected and appointed prosecutors whose mission is to provide training and technical assistance to prosecutors in the United States,  and to facilitate collaboration with criminal justice partners on emerging issues related to the administration of justice.  APA President and CEO David LaBahn participated in the roundtable on non-conviction records held in August at the University of Michigan Law School, a project that relies heavily on the state law research in the RRP.  The RRP’s other partner organizations are the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, National Legal Aid & Defender Association, and National HIRE Network. The RRP describes current U.S. law and practice concerning restoration of rights and record relief following arrest or conviction in the 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and federal system, in three formats: summaries of every jurisdiction, detailed profiles of each jurisdiction, and 50-state comparison charts.  Topics include sealing and expungement, employment and licensing, pardons, voting, jury service, public office, and firearms rights.   People visit the RRP more than 1,000 […]

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Legislative update: third quarter 2019 sees more new licensing and expungement laws

In July we reported on the extraordinary number of new laws enacted in the first half of 2019 aimed at restoring rights and status after arrest and conviction.  A total of 97 separate pieces of legislation, some covering multiple topics, were enacted by 38 states and many broke new ground in their jurisdictions.  Moreover, clear trends begun in 2018 accelerated in the first half of 2019, as state lawmakers continued to focus most of their attention on facilitating access to record-clearing.  In addition, a significant number of new laws limited the authority of occupational licensing boards to disqualify a person based on criminal record.  Another area of progress was restoring voting rights. Those trends continued over the summer, with 17 new laws, including significant laws enacted to regulate occupational licensing and expand record relief, including but not limited to marijuana convictions.  Several states showed a keen interest in exploring the possibility of automating record relief, although only one state actually enacted an automatic relief system by the end of the quarter (New York, for marijuana convictions).  (California enacted a “clean slate” law shortly after the beginning of the fourth quarter.)  At the end of the third quarter, Arkansas, Colorado and Florida […]

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California becomes third state to adopt “clean slate” record relief

On October 8, Governor Newsom signed into law AB 1076, the so-called “Clean Slate Act,” authorizing automatic record relief in the form of set-aside or sealing for individuals with certain convictions and arrests under California law.  The new law supplements but does not supplant the existing system of petition-based relief, and applies to convictions and arrests occurring after the bill’s effective date of January 1, 2021.  Eligibility for automatic relief under the new law is similar to but not precisely coincident with eligibility under existing law.  The new law also for the first time prohibits courts and the state repository from disclosing information about conviction records that have been granted relief, except where specifically authorized, whether under the new automatic process or the older petition-based system. California is now the third state to adopt general “clean slate” record relief, after Pennsylvania (2018) and Utah (2019).  While the automatic feature of the new law has prospective effect only, its limits on disclosure will, when effective, apply to all conviction records that have at any time been dismissed or set aside, whether automatically or by petition, as well as to all arrests and other non-conviction records that have been sealed.  The specific […]

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