GOP lawmakers propose repealing NC law they passed to erase criminal records

A bipartisan proposal to fix issues with the implementation of a state law that provided for arrest records to be automatically erased in some cases is no longer moving forward.

Instead, a legislative committee approved on Wednesday legislation that would repeal the law allowing automatic expunctions.

The existing law expunged arrest records after people were found not guilty or had their charges dismissed. It went into effect under the Second Chance Act, a major criminal justice reform bill that lawmakers unanimously passed in 2020.

The bill that would repeal the law was advanced by the House Judiciary 2 Committee over objections by Democrats and despite pushback from advocates who urged GOP lawmakers to keep automatic expunctions in place, and pass the solutions devised by a working group consisting of various state and local law enforcement leaders.

Lawmakers introduced the bill Wednesday as a substitute to the proposal that would have resumed automatic expunctions by Dec. 1, while implementing some of the changes recommended by the working group. That proposal passed the Senate unanimously in April 2023.

Problems with court records not being retained

Rep. Sarah Stevens, the Republican committee chair who presented the bill, said there were several problems stemming from court records not being retained when cases were being automatically expunged, which made it necessary to repeal the law for the time being.

“It’s not that we’re not willing to visit (this) again, and it’s not that there’s not a remedy to get your dismissal expunged,” Stevens said. “But right now, this system was not working, for the clerks, for the DAs, even for the defendants.”

Lawmakers elected to pause automatic expunctions twice after the rollout revealed unintended consequences, The News & Observer reported.

Those included people remaining in jail because paperwork sheriffs needed to release them after their charges were dismissed had been destroyed; public defenders being unable to calculate their hours for payment; and defendants who had been acquitted not being able to prove that their charges had been dismissed to immigration officials, employers, or housing managers.

The working group addressed all of those issues, said Whitley Carpenter, the senior criminal justice counsel and policy manager at Forward Justice.

“With any new system, implementation may initially present some problems,” Carpenter told lawmakers, “but as we have seen in the many other states that have passed similar laws, we have to be willing to work through these problems if we really want to address the second chance gap,” she said.

A ‘scarlet letter’ to contend with

Stevens said that if automatic expunctions are stopped entirely, people whose charges are dismissed by prosecutors can still fill out a form requesting their case be expunged, and that doing so shouldn’t cost them anything.

Democratic Rep. Marcia Morey, who served as a judge in Durham for 18 years, said processing those forms in courts that are already backlogged can take months if not years, and that lawmakers need to follow through on the commitment they made to people who deserve to have their cases expunged.

“We told people, if you are not guilty, or if the DA has dismissed your charges, it will not be a scarlet letter on your chest to prevent you from getting jobs, getting housing,” Morey said.

Morey acknowledged the issues that arose after automatic expunctions went into effect, but said the solution wasn’t to throw the entire system out, but to adopt the fixes that had been put forth, and passed by the Senate.

Several advocates from criminal justice reform groups also urged Republicans to not repeal the law, telling the committee that despite snags in the rollout, automatic expunctions benefited more than 400,000 eligible North Carolinians in the first eight months the program was in place, before it was paused.

“An expunction for someone can be the difference between having access to employment, housing, or other means to support themselves and their families,” said Quisha Mallette, a staff attorney at the NC Justice Center.

“Many people that I serve are shocked to hear that after a decade or more, for some of my clients, even 50 years, they still have to deal with this mark on their record,” she said. “Others are surprised to hear that a dismissal appears on their record at all.”

Staff writer Virginia Bridges contributed to this report.