Senate Judiciary resumes S.12 markup on sealing, expungement for 18–21-year-olds and municipal violations

Senate Judiciary resumed markup of S.12 on procedural clarifications and substantive changes to sealing and expungement provisions, focusing on three areas: records for people who were 18–21 at the time of an offense; how and when municipal or judicial-bureau violations are removed from records; and aligning earlier motor-vehicle expungement law with the bill.

Speaker 1, a committee member, opened the session saying, "Hello? Hi. We're back in senate judiciary. We're gonna resume our conversation about s 12." The committee discussed whether records for individuals who were 18–21 at the time of the offense should be automatically expunged within 30 days of successful completion of sentence, or whether the individual must file a petition with a court to obtain expungement.

The text under consideration says qualifying records for someone aged 18–21 are to be "expunged within 30 days after the date on which the individual successfully completed the terms and conditions of the sentence." Speaker 3 observed that the bill also contains a separate petition process (subsection c), and said the parallel language is confusing: "it kinda sounds almost like it's…