Tag: Chin

New Mexico a new leader in criminal record reforms

This year, New Mexico enacted three significant laws restoring rights and opportunities to people with a criminal record, continuing a recent trend of major reforms in this area. The three measures involve adopting most of the provisions of the Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act, authorizing automatic expungement for a broad range of marijuana offenses as part of legalization, and expanding existing law regulating public employment and licensure to prohibit consideration of many types of convictions. A fourth new law significantly limits burdens imposed by court debt. These developments follow 2019 reforms introducing expungement into the state’s legal system for the very first time—through a comprehensive system of petition-based relief for most types of criminal records—and adopting a private sector ban-the-box law.

For these 2019 reforms, New Mexico earned an “honorable mention” for a productive legislative season in our reintegration report card for that year. This year’s noteworthy follow-up measures, summarized below, make New Mexico a contender for CCRC’s “reintegration champion” award in 2021.

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Federal Certificate Offers New Hope for Americans in ‘Internal Exile’

The title of this post is the title of our op-ed in The Crime Report in support of a bipartisan Senate bill that would authorize judges to issue a “Certificate of Rehabilitation” to qualified individuals with federal convictions.  The bill in question was included in the Business Roundtable’s “Second Chance Agenda,” which was the subject of a post here two weeks ago.  The op ed is reprinted below:

Federal Certificate Offers New Hope for Americans in ‘Internal Exile’

The collateral consequences of a federal conviction have thrust many Americans into what some have termed an “internal exile.” Barriers that prevent full reintegration into society are liberally distributed in federal and state laws and regulations.

Congress is now weighing a new form of relief—a Certificate of Rehabilitation—intended to address the absence of any general federal restoration of rights regime, leaving aside the once-robust, now rare and erratic presidential pardon power.

Under the proposed RE-ENTER Act of 2019 (S. 2931), the certificates would be issued by a judge to alleviate the burdens of a criminal record.

The concept was pioneered by New York more than half a century ago, and is currently authorized in 12 states. It has been recommended by the major national law reform organizations.

Now more than ever, there is a pressing need for judicial relief to supplement the federal pardon power: President Donald Trump’s neglect of the Justice Department advisory process has produced a 3,000-case backlog of post-sentence pardon applications.

So far, the RE-ENTER Act has been languishing in committee, despite bipartisan support.

While the Senate is otherwise occupied at the moment, a recent endorsement by the Business Roundtable may have given it new momentum. It’s possible that S. 2931 will be considered in the lame duck session or reintroduced after the new Congress is seated.

For tens of thousands of Americans, that would be welcome news.

There are several things to like about the bill.

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CCRC scholarship round-up – August 2019

Editor’s note:  This past year has seen a burgeoning of scholarship dealing with collateral consequences broadly defined, from lawyers, social scientists, and philosophers.  CCRC’s good friend Alessandro Corda has selected fifteen notable articles published in 2018-19, with information, links, and abstracts.  They are organized into five categories:

(1) Legal collateral consequences

(2) Collateral consequences and criminal procedure

(3) Sex offender registration laws

(4) Informal collateral consequences

(5) Criminal records, expungement, sealing, and other relief mechanisms

A complete and regularly updated collection of scholarship on issues relating to collateral consequences and criminal records can be found on our “Books & Articles” page.  From time to time we will preview and comment on new articles, and Alessandro has promised to provide another round-up by the end of the year.  We hope he will continue indefinitely in the role of CCRC’s official bibliographer.  (A PDF copy of this scholarship round-up is here.)

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Erasing the line between felony and misdemeanor

Two provocative new scholarly articles examine the extent to which the crisp line historically drawn in law between felonies and misdemeanors is becoming increasingly ephemeral.  In Informed Misdemeanor Sentencing, Jenny Roberts points out that conviction of a misdemeanor has become exponentially more serious in recent years as the associated collateral consequences have increased in number and severity.  She urges judges to “explicitly acknowledge the many serious collateral consequences an individual suffers after any penal sanction, and incorporate those into the sentencing process to ensure that punishment is proportionate.”  She recommends that sentencing courts should make “more use of deferred adjudication as well as expungement and related mechanisms for mitigating the unintended effects of a misdemeanor conviction.”

Jack Chin and John Ormonde make essentially the same point about the blurring of the old distinction between felony and misdemeanor in a forthcoming article in the Minnesota Law Review.  In Infamous Misdemeanors and the Grand Jury Clause, they point out that “[i]n the late 19th and early 20th century, the Supreme Court held in a series of cases, never overruled, that to charge an infamous misdemeanor required a grand jury indictment.”  They conclude that, because of the stigma that attaches to any criminal record, the Fifth Amendment requires that “many more federal offenses should be prosecuted by grand jury indictment than is now the practice.”

It is impossible to determine exactly how many of the 48,000 consequences collected in the National Inventory of the Collateral Consequences of Conviction are triggered by a misdemeanor conviction, but so many legal and regulatory consequences attach to specific categories of offenses that include misdemeanors (e.g., drug crimes, sexual offenses, crimes involving dishonesty), it is likely a substantial portion.  Moreover, given the ubiquity of criminal background checking pervading every area of modern life, even a criminal record involving dismissed misdemeanor charges may result in discrimination and exclusion.

Below are the abstracts for these two articles:

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