The process of getting rid of a crime from a person's criminal record is called expungement. There are a number of other words for getting a criminal record erased. It is often used to talk about how government agencies seal, destroy, or return to the subject of a person's criminal record.
A Brief Look at Erasing Criminal Records
To get rid of criminal records, you have to choose between different goals. A person would like to look for work, a place to live, or do other important things in life without the shame of an arrest record or a record of conviction. On the other hand, society has an interest in keeping criminal records so that future crimes can be investigated and so that people can be hired, rented to, and other things. The tension between these interests is shown in laws and court cases.
You can get rid of your criminal record in different ways. In reality, criminal records can be erased by law and by the courts' own power.
What does it mean to "erase" a criminal record?
Criminal records can be erased by sealing them, destroying them, or giving them back to the people who have them. In a given situation, the exact remedy depends on what the law says or how the court interprets its own power.
How to get rid of a criminal record
Even though each state has its own way of getting rid of records, most laws say that arrest records held by law enforcement must be returned to the person who was arrested if the person is found not guilty before certain stages of the criminal justice process. This means that the person has the right to have his arrest records erased if there is no more evidence linking him to the crime and no other criminal justice action is taken against him.
By law, criminal records held by any criminal justice agency will be expunged or sealed by a court order, but not returned or destroyed. This is often done if the person was convicted in a type of case covered by the state law or if the case was handled in a certain way that didn't lead to a conviction. So, any criminal records or court filings that were made in a case where no one was convicted or where the crime fell into a category listed in the law can be erased or sealed by the court that was in charge of the case.
Lastly, the courts have said that they have the power to order that criminal records from the judicial branch be sealed or erased. They can also, to a lesser extent, use this power to erase criminal records held by other parts of the state government.
