Category: Civil practice

Restoration of firearm rights after conviction: Findings and recommendations

We are pleased to publish an updated version of our report on state laws governing loss and restoration of firearm rights after a criminal conviction: Restoration of Firearm Rights After Conviction: A National Survey and Recommendations for Reform.

This report, a version of which was originally published in June of 2025, finds that felony dispossession laws in most states extend well beyond what is necessary to advance public safety objectives, and that the process for regaining lost rights tends to be difficult to navigate if accessible at all.

Our report argues that broad categorical dispossession laws are more vulnerable to constitutional challenge under the Second Amendment where a state does not provide an easily accessible process for restoring rights based on an individualized assessment of public safety risk. It makes a number of recommendations to this end, which are summarized at the end of this post.  

Since our report was first published six months ago, there have been some changes in state laws warranting an update. More significant, however, in July 2025 the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) proposed to revive a long-dormant program under 18 U.S.C. § 925(c) for restoring rights lost under the federal dispossession statute. Originally administered by ATF, the revived program will be administered by DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. We decided that this development was important to cover in what is otherwise a report on state law, because of the close relationship between state and federal dispossession laws.

In a related development, DOJ seems to agree with our report’s argument that the existence of an accessible restoration mechanism may cure constitutional deficiency in a dispossession statute. Thus, the U.S. Solicitor General relied upon the renewed availability of administrative relief from federal restrictions under § 925(c) in arguing that the Supreme Court should decline to grant review in the case of a Utah woman federally dispossessed because of a dated conviction for food stamp fraud. See Brief for the Respondent in Opposition, Vincent v. Bondi, No. 24-1155, at 9 (Aug.11, 2025). For a review of Second Amendment cases on the radar of the Supreme Court this Term, see Kelsey Dallas, Second Amendment in the spotlight, SCOTUSblog (Nov. 13, 2025).

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Applying for federal disaster assistance with a criminal record

In addition to its lending and other programs in support of small businesses, the U.S. Small Business Administration provides long-term low-interest loans under Section 7(b) of the Small Business Act directly to individuals, businesses, and nonprofits in declared disaster areas. The current devastation wrought by Hurricane Ian in Florida — the subject of a dedicated new page on the SBA’s website — reminded us of some research we published two years ago, at the height of the pandemic, about how people with a criminal record were faring under the SBA’s COVID-related disaster relief program.  The answer initially was “not well.”

Our research indicates that neither FEMA (emergency aid) nor the USDA (farm loans) impose criminal record restrictions on disaster assistance.  But the SBA does.  What’s more, the SBA’s restrictions are not formalized in a regulation but buried in operating procedures.

The criminal history restrictions on SBA economic injury disaster loans (EIDL) under the CARES Act were initially even more restrictive than those that applied to its PPP relief, and they too were never formalized in a rule. The PPP restrictions were rolled back in response to public outcry and lawsuits, and the following year the COVID-related EIDL policy was also rolled back to disqualify the same limited population as the PPP itself (people in prison or on probation or parole, with pending felony charges, or with recent financial fraud and related convictions).  However, criminal record restrictions in the SBA’s general non-COVID lending programs, including its general disaster assistance programs, were not affected.

Now that the SBA’s disaster assistance programs are no longer administered under the exceptional and well-publicized approach of the pandemic-related authorities, we thought it would be timely to take another look at how those programs — presumably including the one that specifically applies to Hurricane Ian relief — are available to people with a criminal record.    

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How Utah Got Automatic Expungement

Editor’s note: We are pleased to publish this fascinating account of how one state transformed its record relief system in little more than a year from a standing start, written by a person who had a central role in the transformation.     

In March of 2019, Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed HB 431, Utah’s Clean Slate law.  At the time, this made Utah the third state in the nation to pass a law automating the criminal record expungement process.  That law went into effect on May 1, 2020, but due to COVID-19, implementation efforts were delayed.  Several months later, implementation is back on track, and it is now anticipated that Utah’s state agencies will begin clearing court and repository records of non-convictions and qualifying misdemeanor convictions by the end of March. Preliminary estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of people across the state will have their records expunged automatically.

What follows is a story about how Utah, one of the reddest states in the nation, came to adopt such a generous and efficient record relief system. As someone who was involved in that process from the beginning, I hope it will be helpful to others seeking to push their own states in that direction.

The Case for Clean Slate

Perhaps the most tragic thing about the number of people struggling with the collateral consequences of a criminal record is that, in many states, so many are eligible to clear their records but so few ever make it through the process.  The petition-based systems that exist in most states are costly, confusing, and cumbersome.  Utah is no exception.

While Utah’s eligibility criteria for expungement are quite generous (allowing for multiple felony and misdemeanor records to be expunged), the expungement process is expensive and time-consuming.  In most cases, individuals must hire an attorney to understand the complex eligibility criteria and procedural requirements. Then they must apply for and obtain from the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI), a “certificate of eligibility,” which expires after 90 days and involves additional cost. Then they must travel to several municipal courthouses across the state to file their paperwork in person, and potentially go back to court later for a full hearing before a judge if either the prosecutor or the victim objects. From start to finish, the process can take more than a year to complete.  As a result, only around 2,000 expungement petitions are filed statewide each year, which represents a small percentage of those who are eligible.

The Path to Clean Slate

Utah’s Clean Slate story starts with jobs.  In 2018, Utah’s unemployment rate was under 3%, one of the lowest rates in the nation.  I remember sitting in the back of courtroom, listening to a judge ask a defendant whether he worked.  The individual said no, and the judge said, “Well why not?  In this economy, if you can breathe, you can find a job.”  But that wasn’t quite true.  While jobs were plentiful, one thing was still keeping people out of the work force: criminal records.

In December 2017, I was working as the Criminal Justice Advisory Council Director for Salt Lake County.  I received a phone call from the Department of Workforce Services, with a request to put on a criminal record expungement workshop for job seekers.  The Department explained that while Utah’s economy was one of the best in the nation, criminal records continued to be a huge barrier to employment.

In my former life, I was a public defender, and had some experience with criminal record expungement work, since Utah has offered expungement on a fairly broad basis for several decades. I told the Department that I did not think that a workshop telling people how to navigate Utah’s complicated petition-based expungement process was going to be very effective, nor did I think that the target audience was likely to have the resources necessary to navigate it. But I was excited about the interest and wanted to do something.  Instead, I asked whether the Department would be interested in trying to do something different: putting on an “Expungement Day” event.  Unlike other expungement clinics, the goal of “Expungement Day,” would be to bring the lawyers, courts, criminal repository, and community partners into one room, and work together to try to streamline the criminal record expungement process into a single day, allowing anyone who showed up to leave with a clean record.

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“The Many Roads to Reintegration”: A 50-state report on laws restoring rights and opportunities

We are pleased to release a new report describing the present landscape of laws in the United States aimed at restoring rights and opportunities after an arrest or conviction. This report, titled The Many Roads to Reintegration, is an update and refresh of our previous national survey, last revised in 2018.

The report covers voting and firearms rights, an array of record relief remedies such as expungement and pardon, and consideration of criminal record in employment and occupational licensing.

In each section of the report we assign a grade to each state for each type of relief. We collate these grades to produce an overall ranking on the nine categories that we graded. That ranking is reproduced below.

We are encouraged by the amazing progress that has been made in the past few years toward neutralizing the effect of a criminal record since the present reform era got underway less than a decade ago. The last two years in particular have produced a bumper crop of new laws in almost every U.S. jurisdiction.

Some of our top performers have been long-time leaders in promoting reintegration, including Illinois, Utah, and Minnesota. But some of the most progressive lawmaking has come from states newer to the field, like Nevada, Colorado, and North Dakota. These and the other states in our Top Ten set an example that we hope will inspire other jurisdictions in the months and years to come.

The executive summary of the report is reprinted below. The full report is available in PDF and HTML formats.

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CCRC research featured in Florida felony voting case briefs

Last week, we published our amicus brief in an appeal about the constitutionality of Florida’s system for restoring the vote to people with felony convictions.  We urged the Eleventh Circuit to affirm a district court decision that Florida’s “pay-to-vote” system is unconstitutional, relying on our research report showing that few states have as restrictive a scheme as Florida’s.  Other groups also weighed in, including 19 states and D.C. and several organizations that draw on CCRC’s research to argue in favor of the decision below.  CCRC board members Jack Chin and Nora Demleitner joined a group of 93 law professors who also argued in favor of the district court’s determination that Florida’s scheme is unconstitutional.

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