House Judiciary hearing highlights debate over S.12 sealing and expungement framework

Marshall Paul of the Office of the Defender General testified Thursday during a House Judiciary Committee hearing that S.12, the committee’s sealing-and-expungement bill, reduces confidentiality for criminal records by eliminating petition‑based expungement and converting some automatic expungements to petition-based sealing.

Paul told the committee the bill expands which offenses may be sealed compared with current law but said the expansion is modest and that an earlier draft, H.762 (2024), would have applied confidentiality much more broadly. “S.12 eliminates petition‑based expungement,” Paul said. “We think that expungement — petition based expungement — is the gold standard. It means the physical destruction of all the files related to a charge.”

Paul and other witnesses described three central concerns: (1) petition‑based expungement would be removed under S.12, reducing actual destruction of records; (2) sealing leaves records accessible to agencies and therefore vulnerable to misuse or exposure; and (3) storing sealed files electronically increases the risk that highly sensitive materials (for example, pre‑sentence reports, psychological evaluations, or public…