National News
Simplifying How the Courts Seal Criminal Records
April 10, 2017 posted by Steve Brownstein
New legislation in Pennsylvania would change the now-costly and time-consuming process—and mitigate the employment obstacles people face when they cannot shake their old convictions.
Jody, 57, checked her phone and tapped her foot as she sat in the pews of a courtroom on a recent Friday in March, waiting for the arrival of a court official who was running late to her hearing. Jody, who asked that her last name be withheld, was ready for this day to be over. “So I can get on with my life,” she explained.
The grandmother of three was convicted of welfare fraud nearly 30 years ago. She spent about a month in jail and paid a restitution fine of $1,937, which she paid off in monthly installments of $25 over the course of 17 years. Even when her dues were settled, though, the misdemeanor conviction plagued her. Most recently, Jody, who’s been a certified nursing assistant for 38 years, was rejected from a job because a prospective employer noticed her conviction in a background check. “I was furious,” she said.
Afterward, Jody sought legal help, and learned through an attorney that she would soon be eligible to have her record sealed, the legal term for restricting access to it. The process wasn’t as quick as Jody might have liked, however: After her lawyer filed an application for the sealing, and Jody paid a $132 fee, she had to wait four months for her hearing that Friday morning in court.
Soon, Pennsylvanians like Jody might not need to take so many steps to get their records sealed. A bipartisan bill that’s slated to be introduced in the state legislature would create a system for automating the process—with technology largely supplanting the extra time, money, and legal savvy that’s currently required to seal a record. Criminal-justice reformers see the legislation, dubbed the Clean Slate Act, as a potential model for other states that want to simplify their arduous processes. “The number of people who get expungements and sealings is minuscule compared to the number that are potentially eligible for it,” said Jody’s lawyer Sharon Dietrich, litigation director of Community Legal Services, a Philadelphia-based legal-aid organization.
The reform advocates, court administrators, and lawmakers who helped shape the bill essentially want to use the same technology that made background searches pervasive—the digitalization of court records—to make sealing those records simple. Background checks are a relatively recent obstacle to employment for convicted persons. Before the proliferation of the internet, it was rare—and difficult—for employers or landlords to search an applicant’s criminal history. It would require a trip to the courthouse, where a clerk would manually pull a record. As recently as the early 1990s, less than half of companies routinely ran background checks during hiring; now, nearly 90 percent do. An estimated one in three Americans has a criminal record, the same number of Americans who have a college degree.
In short, the Clean Slate Act mandates that records are automatically sealed within two months of becoming eligible and prescribes the process by which it happens. It would work like this: A court administrator at the central Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, or AOPC, would run a monthly query of their electronic-record database to pull all the eligible records for sealing. Eligibility would depend on the severity of a person’s crime and how long it’s been since their last conviction; for a misdemeanor like Jody’s, 10 years would need to pass.