Attorney General presses for compromise on S.12 to expand sealing of criminal records

Attorney General Erin told the Senate Judiciary Committee on S.12 on Oct. 12 that her office supports moving from a system of piecemeal expungement to a broader sealing regime and urged lawmakers to resolve a small number of technical and access issues so the bill can pass.

The attorney general told senators her office runs expungement clinics and said those clinics inform her view that sealing helps people secure jobs, participate in community life and move on with their lives. “We are the lawyer to the state in a nutshell,” she said, describing the office’s role and experience handling criminal and civil matters. She said the office has about 150 staff and roughly 100 lawyers and that a Medicaid-fraud unit is largely federally funded.

The proposal in S.12 would expand the set of records that become sealed, reduce reliance on the current patchwork of expungement mechanisms and, ideally, create an automatic sealing process. The attorney general described “super sealing” as a particular point of contention: one draft would…