Witnesses tell Judiciary panel Vermont’s criminal-history systems cannot selectively release sealed records under S.12

Jeffrey Walton, director of the Vermont Crime Information Center, told the House Judiciary Committee that VCIC treats expungement and sealing differently and that state systems are not currently structured to selectively release sealed records on request.

“If something is expunged, it’s as if it never happened,” Walton said, explaining that an expunged record is removed from VCIC and federal partners. He said a sealed record remains in VCIC but is “flagged as sealed” and must be filtered by staff before information is provided to non-law-enforcement requesters such as licensing agencies.

The committee heard the practical consequences from Christina Lynch, a Valcour subject-matter expert and contractor, who described how documents and incident files are stored at local agencies and in the Valcour records-management system. “When that order to seal comes in … we go in, and we have a button on the person’s name jacket in that incident. And that button says seal, and we click that button,” Lynch said, describing the agency-level action that marks a person or an incident as sealed inside Valcour.

Why it matters: committee members considering S.12 want to expand the set of convictions that can be sealed while still allowing law-enforcement use in defined circumstances. Witnesses told the panel that changing from expungement (which removes records entirely) to sealing (which retains records but hides them for most uses) shifts the technical and operational…