Category: Relief

Michigan makes sealing of convictions automatic, including for some felonies

On October 12, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a series of bills that will dramatically reform that state’s “set-aside” authority, colloquially known as “expungement.” The bills will establish a new automatic mechanism to expunge certain convictions without a person having to ask for it, and significantly expand eligibility for expungement under the existing petition-based application system.

“This is a historic day in Michigan. These bipartisan bills are a game changer for people who are seeking opportunities for employment, housing, and more, and they will help ensure a clean slate for hundreds of thousands of Michiganders,” said Governor Whitmer. “This is also an opportunity to grow our workforce and expand access to job training and education for so many people. I am proud to sign these bills today alongside Lieutenant Governor Gilchrist and many of the bipartisan leaders who worked on them.”

“Everyone deserves the chance to build a good life for themselves and their families. But far too many people enter the criminal justice system and end up cut off from those opportunities and are pushed toward a cruel cycle of poverty and crime. That’s not right, and it creates bad outcomes for all of us,” said Republican House Speaker Lee Chatfield. “These bills are an important step to righting that wrong and helping good people who’ve paid their debt get back on their feet. I am glad we were able to find common ground on this important issue and deliver reform that will help people statewide.” 

It is estimated that the bills will make hundreds of thousands of Michiganders eligible for expungement for the first time, and that relief will be delivered automatically to a significant percentage of them when the automatic feature is expected to become operative in October 2022 (subject to necessary appropriation and a potential 180-day extension). The other bills signed into law, including one that streamlines expungement for marijuana misdemeanors, are effective immediately.

This legislative package makes Michigan the sixth state to enact an automatic conviction-sealing law covering a range of offenses. It also makes Michigan the third state to make relief automatic for some felony convictions, joining New Jersey and California. (An additional three states plus California have enacted more specialized laws to automatically seal low-level marijuana convictions.)

The specific provisions of the Michigan bills, as well as automatic sealing laws in other states, are discussed below.

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The Reintegration Report Card

We are pleased to publish “The Reintegration Report Card,” a new resource that ranks and grades all 50 states on how their laws address voting rights, record relief (including expungement and pardon), fair employment, and occupational licensing for people with a criminal record.

This Report Card supplements our recent 50-state report, “The Many Roads to Reintegration.” That report surveys U.S. laws aimed at restoring rights and opportunities after arrest or conviction. It grades the states on nine different types of restoration laws, including voting rights, six different record relief remedies, and laws regulating consideration of criminal record in employment and occupational licensing. Based on these grades, the report includes an overall ranking of the states and D.C.

This Report Card provides the grades and rankings in a more easily accessible form. It also includes a brief narrative summary of how each state’s law stacks up in the different graded categories. Our hope is that these summaries will suggest ways in which a state might improve its laws and hence its overall ranking. An appendix collects all the grades and rankings (the rankings are also at the end of this post).

We emphasize once again that our grades are based solely on the text of each state’s law, leaving more nuanced judgments about their actual operation to practitioners, researchers, and the law’s intended beneficiaries. We expect to look more closely at the operation of some of the record relief laws in the near future, and welcome comments and suggestions from those who have experience with them. In the meantime, we hope our grades will challenge, encourage, and inspire additional reforms in the months and years ahead.

The Reintegration Report Card is available at this link. For more details and legal citations for each state, see the Restoration of Rights Project. For essays surveying each topic, consult “The Many Roads to Reintegration.”

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Michigan to be sixth state with automatic conviction relief

*Update (10/12/20): Gov. Whitmer signed the legislation into law.

On September 23, the Michigan legislature approved a series of bills that would dramatically reform that state’s “set-aside” authority, colloquially known as “expungement.” The bills, which are headed to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for signature, would significantly expand eligibility for expungement under the existing petition-based application system, and establish a new automatic mechanism to expunge certain convictions without a person having to ask for it.

It is estimated that the bills will make hundreds of thousands of Michiganders eligible for expungement for the first time, and that relief will be delivered automatically to a significant percentage of them when the automatic feature becomes operative in October 2022. The other provisions of the bills are effective immediately.

This package would make Michigan the sixth state to enact an automatic conviction-sealing law covering a range of offenses. It would also make Michigan the third state to make relief automatic for some felony convictions, joining New Jersey and California. (An additional three states plus California have enacted more specialized laws to automatically seal low-level marijuana convictions.)

The specific provisions of the Michigan bills, as well as automatic sealing laws in other states, are discussed below.

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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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NC court rules vote may not be denied based on court debt

On September 4, a North Carolina state court issued a major decision on restoration of voting rights.  In North Carolina, voting rights lost upon a felony conviction are automatically restored upon “unconditional discharge” of sentence or unconditional pardon.  A three-judge panel, observing that “unconditional discharge” can be delayed for up to eight years because of unpaid restitution and other financial obligations, ruled that conditioning the vote on payment of money violates the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and ban on property qualifications in voting.  The court held, in a 2-1 ruling, that the state may not withhold the vote from people whose only remaining aspect of their sentence–other than regular conditions of probation–is payment of a financial obligation. The dissenting judge opined that people convicted of felonies have no “fundamental interest” in voting.

The court issued a summary judgment order and preliminary injunction requiring the state to allow individuals to register to vote immediately if: (1) their “only remaining barrier to obtaining a ‘unconditional discharge’ other than regular conditions of probation…is the payment of a monetary amount”; or (2) they have been discharged from probation and owed a monetary amount upon termination of probation, including if the amount was reduced to a civil lien.

Forward Justice, Protect Democracy, and Arnold & Porter represent the plaintiffs in the case: Community Success Initiative, the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, Justice Served NC, Inc, and Wash Away Unemployment. Forward Justice’s press release is here.

Meanwhile, the questions raised by Florida’s “pay-to-vote” system remain under consideration by the federal court of appeals for the 11th Circuit.  CCRC filed an amicus brief in that case describing how court debt affects restoration of voting rights in all 50 states. The full court heard argument in the case Jones v. DeSantis on August 18, but it is not clear whether there will be a decision before the October 5 deadline to register to vote in that state.

Expungement, sealing & set-aside of convictions: A national survey

*Update (9/8/20): the full national report, “The Many Roads to Reintegration,” is now available.

Last month we announced the forthcoming publication of a national report surveying mechanisms for restoring rights and opportunities following arrest or conviction, titled “The Many Roads to Reintegration.” So far, we have previewed the report in draft chapters covering “loss and restoration of voting and firearms rights” and “fair employment & occupational licensing,” as well as several sections of the chapter on record relief, a term comprising the various remedies that revise or supplement a person’s criminal record to reduce or eliminate barriers to opportunity in civil society. The sections published so far are “pardon policy and practice,” “deferred adjudication,” “non-conviction records,” and “judicial certificates of relief.”

This final installment of the record relief chapter concerns expungement, sealing, and set-aside of conviction records. These remedies alleviate the stigma and discrimination of a conviction record by restricting access to the record and/or vacating the conviction. At the end of the section, we include a report card with grade for each state’s misdemeanor and felony conviction relief laws.

We expect to publish the entire “Many Roads” report later this week.  In addition to a series of “report cards” on specific relief mechanisms, it will include an ranking of states for the effectiveness of their overall combined relief schemes.

A PDF of the section on conviction relief is available here. The full text follows, with end notes.

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Judicial certificates of relief: A national survey

*Update (9/8/20): the full national report, “The Many Roads to Reintegration,” is now available.

Last month we announced the forthcoming publication of a national report surveying mechanisms for restoring rights and opportunities following arrest or conviction, titled “The Many Roads to Reintegration.” So far, we have previewed the report in draft chapters covering “loss and restoration of voting and firearms rights” and “fair employment & occupational licensing,” as well as several sections of the chapter on record relief, a term comprising the various remedies that revise or supplement a person’s criminal record to reduce or eliminate barriers to opportunity in civil society. The sections published so far are “pardon policy and practice,” “deferred adjudication,” and “non-conviction records.”

This installment of the record relief chapter concerns judicial certificates, orders that courts or parole boards in a dozen states are authorized to issue to convicted individuals with the dual purpose of avoiding mandatory collateral consequences and helping to overcome discretionary ones. Later this week we will publish the final major section of this chapter, on conviction relief via expungement, sealing, and set-aside.

We expect to publish the entire “Many Roads” report by the end of the month. In addition to a series of “report cards” on specific relief mechanisms, it will include an ranking of states for the effectiveness of their overall combined relief schemes.

A PDF of the section on judicial certificates is available here. The full text follows, with end notes.

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Non-conviction records: A national survey

*Update (9/8/20): the full national report, “The Many Roads to Reintegration,” is now available.

In July, we announced the forthcoming publication of a national report surveying mechanisms for restoring rights and opportunities following arrest or conviction, titled “The Many Roads to Reintegration.” So far, we have previewed the report by publishing draft chapters covering “loss and restoration of voting and firearms rights” and “fair employment & occupational licensing.” We also published “pardon policy and practice” and “deferred adjudication” sections of the chapter on record relief, a term comprising the various remedies that revise or supplement a person’s criminal record to reduce or eliminate barriers to opportunity in civil society.

Today we are publishing a third section of the record relief chapter on non-conviction records: arrest and court records that can create lifelong barriers in employment, housing, and other areas of daily life. More than half the states still require a restrictive and burdensome court procedure to expunge or seal non-convictions. Our Model Law on Non-Conviction Records recommends automatic expungement of these records, an approach that has been enacted in 17 states. Later this week we will publish additional sections of this chapter, on conviction relief, judicial certificates, and juvenile records. We expect to publish the entire “Many Roads” report by the end of the month.

A PDF of the section on non-convictions is available here. The full text follows, with end notes.

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Deferred adjudication: A national survey

*Update (9/8/20): the full national report, “The Many Roads to Reintegration,” is now available.

In July, we announced the forthcoming publication of a national report surveying mechanisms for restoring rights and opportunities following arrest or conviction, titled “The Many Roads to Reintegration.” So far, we have previewed the report by publishing draft chapters covering “loss and restoration of voting and firearms rights” and “fair employment & occupational licensing.” Yesterday we published “pardon policy and practice,” a section of the chapter on record relief, a term comprising the various remedies that revise or supplement a person’s criminal record to reduce or eliminate barriers to opportunity in civil society.

Today we are publishing a second section of the record relief chapter on deferred adjudication, a disposition whose goal is to divert individuals away from a conviction record at the front end of a criminal case. Next week we will publish additional sections of this chapter, on expungement, record-sealing, set-aside, judicial certificates, and juvenile records. We expect to publish the entire “Many Roads” report by the end of the month.

A PDF of the section on deferred adjudication is available here. The full text follows, with end notes.

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Pardon policy & practice: A national survey

*Update (9/8/20): the full national report, “The Many Roads to Reintegration,” is now available.

In July, we announced the forthcoming publication of a national report surveying mechanisms for restoring rights and opportunities following arrest or conviction, titled “The Many Roads to Reintegration.”  So far, we have previewed the report by publishing draft sections covering “loss and restoration of voting and firearms rights” and “fair employment & occupational licensing.”  Today we publish a draft section on pardon, the ultimate expression of forgiveness and reconciliation from the sovereign that secured the conviction.  While pardon is no longer routinely available in all or even most U.S. jurisdictions, in the 18 states where post-sentence pardoning is frequent and regular it provides an important record remedy – frequently the only remedy – for those convicted of more serious offenses, for those seeking restoration of firearms rights, and for non-citizens seeking to avoid conviction-related immigration consequences.

This section on “pardon policy & practice” is part of a chapter on “record relief.”  This chapter deals with any remedy that revises or supplements a person’s criminal record to reduce or eliminate barriers to opportunity in civil society.  Later this week, we will publish additional sections of the record relief chapter on deferred adjudication and judicial certificates, followed next week by sections on expungement, record-sealing, and set-aside.  We expect to publish the entire “Many Roads” report by the end of the month.

A PDF of this section is available here.  The full text follows, with end notes.

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