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Attorney urges SJC to allow narrow juvenile expungement to shield a vacated order’s lifelong harms
Summary
At oral argument in SJC-13854, Attorney Amy DiDonna asked the Supreme Judicial Court to recognize a narrow juvenile equitable remedy allowing vacated juvenile protective orders to be cleared from background and registry systems absent fraud, arguing a nine-year-old will suffer lifelong collateral consequences if records remain.
BOSTON — At oral argument in SJC-13854, Attorney Amy DiDonna told the Supreme Judicial Court that a nine-year-old whose juvenile protective order was later vacated will suffer ‘‘punishment . . . for the remainder of his life’’ because the record remains accessible in background- and registry-check systems.
DiDonna, representing the defendant-appellant who she said she would refer to in argument as John Doe, asked the court to recognize a narrow equitable authority for juvenile courts to provide relief beyond vacatur so that young litigants do not carry permanent civil disabilities from records that persist in background databases.
The request collided with the court’s existing framework. An associate justice pressed DiDonna to point to statutory or common-law authority that…
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