Restoration of Rights Project – Maryland Profile
Guide to restoration of rights, pardon, sealing & expungement following a Maryland criminal conviction
Final Report of the Collateral Consequences Workgroup
Report of workgroup charged by Governor Hogan and the 2016 Justice Reinvestment Act with investigating and making recommendations for reform of Maryland collateral consequences (2016)
The Collateral Consequences of Arrests and Convictions under D.C., Maryland, and Virginia Law
By the Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs (2014)
Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions in Maryland
Reentry of Ex-Offenders Clinic, University of Maryland School of Law (2007)
Related blog posts:
- Oklahoma and California win Reintegration Champion awards for 2022 laws (1/17/2023) - On January 10 we posted our annual report on new laws enacted in 2022 to restore rights and opportunities to people with a record of arrest or conviction. Like our earlier reports, it documents the steady progress of what we characterized two years ago as “a full-fledged law reform movement” aimed at restoring rights and dignity to individuals who have successfully navigated the criminal law system. This year’s criminal record reforms bring the total number of separate laws enacted in the past five years to more than 500. Posted below is our fourth annual legislative Report Card recognizing the most productive states in 2022. Reintegration Awards for 2022 While more than a handful of states enacted noteworthy laws in 2022, two states stand out for the quantity and quality of their legislation: California and Oklahoma share our 2022 Reintegration Champion award for their passage of at least two major pieces of record reform legislation. California – Enacted a whopping 11 new laws, including the broadest general record clearing law in the nation, a direction to courts to effectuate clearing of marijuana records, removal of restitution as a bar to clearing criminal records, easing access to judicial certificates of rehabilitation, and simplification [...]
- Marijuana legalization and record clearing in 2022 (12/20/2022) - CCRC is pleased to announce a new report on recent cannabis-specific record sealing and expungement reforms in the past 18 months. The report, extending CCRC’s fruitful collaboration with the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at The Ohio State University, is available here. An accompanying infographic (reproduced at the end of this postr) summarizes the report’s findings, and includes a color-coded US map showing which states have enacted cannabis-specific record-clearing provisions. To supplement the map, the report includes an appendix classifying and describing marijuana-specific record clearing statutes in all 50 states, based on CCRC’s 50-state comparison chart on “Marijuana Legalization, Decriminalization, Expungement and Clemency.” To put our new report in context, CCRC and DEPC reported 18 months ago on an “unprecedented period for policymaking at the intersection of marijuana legalization and criminal record reform in the first months of 2021,” with four states (New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia) legalizing marijuana possession and at the same time providing criminal record relief for past convictions along with a variety of social equity provisions. Our report shows this trend continuing into 2022. Since our 2021 report, four additional states (Connecticut, Maryland, Missouri, and Rhode Island) have adopted similar record-clearing provisions in [...]
- Waiting for Relief: A National Survey of Waiting Periods for Record Clearing (2/23/2022) - Our new report is the first-ever comprehensive national survey of the period of time a person, who is otherwise eligible to expunge or seal a misdemeanor or felony conviction record, must wait before obtaining this relief. Waiting periods are usually established by statute and can range from 0 to 20 years. Typically, during a waiting period the person must be free from certain forms of involvement with the justice system: from a felony conviction, from any conviction, or from any arrest, again depending on state law. These and other conditions and circumstances may extend (or occasionally shorten) the length of a waiting period in specific cases. Waiting for Relief: A National Survey of Waiting Periods for Record Clearing The waiting periods for misdemeanor convictions range from a high of 10 or 15 years in Maryland (depending on the nature of the offense) to 0 years in Mississippi (although only first-time offenses are eligible), with most states falling at the lower end of that range. Of the 44 states that authorize clearing of misdemeanor convictions, a near-majority have waiting periods of 3 years or less (19 states) and the vast majority have waiting periods of 5 years or less (35 states). [...]
- Dozens of new expungement laws already enacted in 2021 (7/7/2021) - 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 [...]
- Illinois set to become fifth state to cover criminal record discrimination in its fair employment law (2/13/2021) - NOTE: Governor Pritzker signed S1480 into law on March 23. In our recent report on criminal record reforms enacted in 2020, we noted that there were only four states that had fully incorporated criminal record into their fair employment law as a prohibited basis of discrimination. These states (New York, Wisconsin, Hawaii, and California) provide that employers can only disqualify a person based on their record if it meets a specific standard, such as being related to the work in question or posing an unreasonable risk to public safety. Illinois will become the fifth state to take this important step as soon as Governor Pritzker signs S1480. Illinois has been working up to this, having amended its Human Rights Act in 2019 to prohibit employment discrimination based on “an arrest not leading to a conviction, a juvenile record, or criminal history record information ordered expunged, sealed, or impounded.” With S1480, Illinois has now taken the final step of incorporating criminal record fully into the law’s structure, which includes authorization to file a lawsuit in the event administrative enforcement is unsatisfactory. A preliminary analysis of the new Illinois law indicates that it now offers more protection for more people with a [...]
- New 2019 laws restore voting rights in 11 states (1/22/2020) - This is the first in a series of comments describing some of the 153 laws passed in 2019 restoring rights or delivering record relief in various ways. The full report on 2019 laws is available here. Restoration of Civil Rights Voting In 2019, eleven states took steps to restore the right to vote and to expand awareness of voting eligibility. Our experience is that many people convicted of a felony believe they are disqualified from voting when they are not: almost every state restores voting rights automatically to most convicted individuals at some point, if they are even disenfranchised to begin with. The most significant new re-enfranchisement laws were enacted in Colorado, Nevada and New Jersey, where convicted individuals are now eligible to vote except when actually incarcerated. Colorado restored the vote to persons on parole supervision, while Nevada revised its complex system for restoring civil rights so that all people with felony convictions may now vote except while in prison. In one of the final legislative acts of 2019, New Jersey’s governor signed a law limiting disenfranchisement to a period of actual incarceration, even in cases where a court has ordered loss of the vote for election law violations, immediately [...]
- Collateral Consequences in Occupational Licensing Act (6/29/2018) - We’ve noted in recent posts the numerous states that, just in the past three or four months, have enacted broad occupational licensing reforms affecting people with a criminal record. Many of these new laws have been influenced by a model developed by the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm that has been litigating and lobbying to reduce barriers to work for more than two decades. In turn, states like Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee and Wisconsin have built upon IJ’s model to enact even more progressive schemes intended to ensure that people with the requisite professional qualifications will not be unfairly excluded based on a record of arrest or conviction. Now IJ has incorporated many of these progressive refinements into its original model licensing law, the Occupational Licensing Review Act (OLRA), and broken out the provisions relating to criminal records into a free-standing model act specifically directed at managing collateral consequences in the occupational licensing context, the new Collateral Consequences in Occupational Licensing Act (CCOLA).
- More states facilitating licensing for people with a criminal record (4/18/2018) - Last week we posted a description of a detailed new Indiana law regulating consideration of conviction in occupational and professional licensure throughout the state. It now appears that this may represent a trend, as eight additional states have either recently enacted or are poised to enact similarly progressive occupational licensing schemes. New general laws regulating licensure are in place in Arizona, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Similar bills have been enrolled and are on the governor’s desk for signature in Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska, and Tennessee. Arizona’s new 2018 licensing law follows on another law passed in that state in 2017 that authorized provisional licenses for individuals with a criminal record. Massachusett’s new licensing law is part of a more general criminal justice reform bill. Delaware and Connecticut have also recently loosened restrictions on licensing for cosmetology and related professions. The licensing reforms in these states – and in several other states where licensing bills are less far along toward enactment — seem to have been influenced by a model law proposed by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm. Key features of the Model Occupational Licensing Review Act as they affect individuals with criminal records are 1) to provide individuals with an opportunity to seek a [...]
- New research report: Four Years of Second Chance Reforms, 2013-2016 (2/8/2017) - Introduction Since 2013, almost every state has taken at least some steps to chip away at the negative effects of a criminal record on an individual’s ability to earn a living, access housing, education and public benefits, and otherwise fully participate in civil society. It has not been an easy task, in part because of the volume and complexity of state and federal laws imposing collateral consequences. To encourage employers and other decision-makers to give convicted individuals a fair chance, some states have enacted or modified judicial restoration mechanisms like expungement, sealing, and certificates of relief. Others have extended nondiscrimination laws, limited criminal record inquiries, and facilitated front-end opportunities to avoid conviction. In partnership with the NACDL Restoration of Rights Project, the CCRC maintains a comprehensive and current state-by-state guide to mechanisms for restoration of rights and status after conviction. As a part of keeping that resource up to date, we have inventoried measures enacted and policies adopted by states in the past four years to mitigate or avoid the disabling effects of a criminal record, and present it here as a snapshot of an encouraging national trend.
- New era for expungement reform? Too soon to tell. (8/3/2016) - A new article in the Harvard Law & Policy Review evaluates some of the recent legislative efforts to deliver relief from the burden of collateral consequences through new or expanded expungement laws. In “A New Era for Expungement Law Reform? Recent Developments at the State and Federal Levels,” Brian Murray argues that many of the newer record-closing laws are far too modest in scope and effect to have much of an impact on the problem of reintegration, citing Louisiana and Maryland enactments as examples of relief that is both too little and too late. He admires Indiana’s broad new expungement scheme, which limits use of records as well as access to them, regarding it (as do we) as an enlightened exception to a general legislative aversion to risk. He considers recent legislation in Minnesota to fall into a middle category — and we could add Arkansas as another state to have recently augmented and clarified older record-closing laws. Our round-up of new expungement laws enacted just this year finds very little consistency from state to state, with Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and New Jersey all experimenting with different approaches. Murray appreciates the need for a multifaceted approach to the problem of criminal records, and [...]