Senate Judiciary discusses automatic sealing after decriminalization, court procedures for access to sealed records

Senate Judiciary members heard testimony and debated whether criminal records for conduct later decriminalized should be sealed automatically and what procedures courts should use to grant access to sealed records.

The discussion centered on two linked topics: whether the courts should perform petitionless sealing when an offense is decriminalized, and whether defense attorneys should be required to support requests to access sealed records with sworn affidavits rather than an automatic hearing.

Senator Hoskowsky said she favored a petitionless process for offenses that are no longer crimes, stressing the burden on people to monitor legislative changes: "I still stand pretty strongly in the opinion that we shouldn't be asking regular people to be paying attention to everything we do in this building and know, oh, that's no longer a crime," she said, arguing that the judiciary should take the onus for clearing…