Colorado is sealing more than 100,000 court records, the result of a new law that applies to nonviolent offenses and is intended to help people with criminal pasts pass background checks for jobs and housing, The Colorado Sun reports. Most of the crimes are misdemeanors and petty offenses, and many involved drugs or theft. Colorado for years has allowed people to petition to seal their arrests and convictions, a process that requires legal guidance and possibly a hearing before a judge. However the new Clean the Slate Act directs the state judicial system to automatically seal eligible records. The Colorado Judicial Department’s first data scrape required under the law, which went into effect July 1, identified more than 140,000 eligible cases. While the government, including prosecutors, can still see the records, they will no longer appear in the background checks that are required by landlords, businesses and schools.
The law requires that the Colorado Judicial Department produce a list four times per year of all records that are eligible to be automatically sealed, then pass that list along to district attorneys across the state. District attorneys in Colorado’s 22 judicial districts have 45 days to object to records in their regions. The first round, which began in February, had some bumps — the state computer system included thousands of domestic violence records, even though those are not eligible. They fixed the error and created a new list in March. The list of eligible crimes dropped to about 141,000 from 148,000 after objections from district attorneys and the removal of domestic violence cases. After the records are sealed in the judicial system, which is still in process, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation has to remove them from background checks. If a person whose record is sealed commits another crime, the record is unsealed and prosecutors can use it in court. records. “This is a huge deal,” said Abbey Moffitt, a criminal defense attorney and co-founder of Expunge Colorado, a nonprofit that helps people seal their records. “It allows people to move on, to have that redemption and restore their dignity, remove the stigma and contribute to society again.”
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