Jeffery Kytle came to Colorado from Iowa for a ski vacation and left on probation. Twenty-one years ago, there were two ounces of methamphetamine in a room he rented with a friend and supplies that made the police think they were dealing. Kytle, now 66, pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance, a low-level felony. He served four years of probation. Kytle’s 2003 arrest was one of more than 100,000 Colorado criminal convictions to be wiped from the public record this summer under the state’s Clean Slate Act, reports the Denver Post. The sweeping legislation, passed in 2022, set up an automatic record-sealing process for certain lower-level crimes, removing the convictions from most background checks so that years-old crimes don’t perpetually block people from housing, jobs or other opportunities.
Across the state, district attorneys by early May had objected to 4,889 of 109,098 criminal cases eligible for automatic sealing — about 4.5 percent. The rate of prosecutors’ objections varies widely by jurisdiction — from fewer than 1 percent to as high as 31 percent — as different district attorneys take varying approaches to sorting through the cases the State Court Administrator’s Office deemed eligible for automatic sealing. That means where people committed a crime factors into whether or not their public criminal records will now be sealed, raising concern among some advocates about whether the law is being applied fairly. The data show racial disparities in the process, with people of color making up a disproportionate share of DAs’ objections. “That lack of uniformity makes us want to dig deeper,” said Abbey Moffitt of Expunge Colorado, a nonprofit that supported the Clean Slate Act. She and other advocates plan to audit prosecutors’ objections to ensure the district attorneys are following the rules.“T