Senate panel advances overhaul of criminal record sealing law after hours of stakeholder debate

The Senate subcommittee on the Judiciary advanced Senate Bill 1466, a technical and policy follow-up to Virginia's 2021 criminal-record sealing legislation that is scheduled to take effect July 1, 2025. Patron Sen. (chair) explained the bill as a package of procedural, policy and technical fixes developed with input from the Virginia Criminal Law Commission, clerks, Virginia State Police and other stakeholders.

The bill clarifies that all possession-of-marijuana charges and convictions will be sealed under the automatic process as originally intended, and it requires that ancillary matters (for example, probation, suspended sentences, contempt, or failures to appear) be sealed along with the underlying conviction to prevent petitioners from losing sealing opportunities to related matters. It adds a petition remedy for people whose records were eligible for automatic sealing but were missed by computer processes, and it repeals the court-appointed counsel requirement for sealing petitions because stakeholders found implementation infeasible.

The bill also requires payment of restitution before a sealing petition may be filed; allows…