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Estimating the number of individuals eligible for expungement

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laurafeeney edited this page May 2, 2021 · 1 revision

Current analysis (2021)

In January 2021, we spoke with Sana from CfJJ and got a new set of criteria for expungement eligibility to analyze, based on current and proposed changes to the law.

Criteria

There are 3 conditions for expungement eligibility to be analyzed.

1. Current criteria:

  • A. Age <21 at the offense date
  • B. No offenses on the list of ineligible offenses on 100J (any offense makes your entire record ineligible)
  • C. <=2 incidents/cases with a guilty finding/conviction
  • D. <=2 incidents/cases with a non-guilty finding
  • [note: The limit is per category of disposition, not total. You cannot have 3 or for non-guilty cases.]

2. Modified criteria to analyze: Same as 1, except change B to: No offenses that are related to sex or murder. i.e.,

  • A. Age <21 at the offense date
  • B. No offenses that are related to sex or murder (any such offense makes your entire record ineligible)
  • C. <=2 incidents/cases with a guilty finding/conviction
  • D. <=2 incidents/cases with a non-guilty finding

3. Modified criteria to analyze:

  • A. Age <21 at the offense date
  • B. No offenses with a guilty finding / conviction that are on the list of ineligible offenses on 100J
  • C. <= 4 incidents/cases (total)

Estimates

There are further criteria one must meet for their record to be expunged. Primarily, they must meet a waiting period requirement: 3 years from the completion of any sentence after misdemeanors, and 7 years for felonies. The data we have access to does not have sentencing information, so the best we can do with this is to estimate who would likely be eligible after a waiting period (assuming they commit no further offenses).

We also lack final disposition data for some cases: some are missing a disposition entirely, and others indicate a case that is 'pending' or otherwise in progress. For example, a disposition may be "continued without finding." If the individual complies with any terms of parole (if relevant) and commits no future offenses, the case listed as 'continued without finding' will eventually be changed to a non-guilty disposition. But if they violate these terms, the original case by be found guilty. It seems that cases where the defendant is sent to a diversion program such as pre-trial probation is conceptually similar: the case will become non-guilty or dropped if they comply and commit no further offenses, but may be found guilty otherwise.

Because of these imprecisions (and other not listed here), it is impossible to determine that any given individual's record is definitively eligible for expungement. We can only determine that they are "likely/possibly eligible" or "not yet disqualified from future expungement".

To provide estimates given these imprecisions, we propose to categorize individuals into 4 groups:

1a. Likely eligible / not disqualified today, based on the information we have, and waiting period is likely complete. This would mean:

  • We have final dispositions for all charges, and can group them into guilty/non-guilty
  • At least 3 years have passed since the charge date for misdemeanors, and 7 years for felonies. Note that this is still an estimate since we don't have sentencing data. Given the years for which we have data, this will be a small set of individuals.

1b. Likely eligible / not disqualified today, based on the information we have, pending waiting period. This would mean:

  • We have final dispositions for all charges, and can group them into guilty/non-guilty
  • The waiting period has not yet passed and/or we do not have full information on misdemeanor/felony

2. Potentially eligible: We don't have full disposition data, but otherwise they don't violate any criteria

  • We cannot group all dispositions into guilty/non-guilty, but the individual has <=4 total offenses and does not currently exceed the 2/2 limit for either guilty/nonguilty category.
  • The above may be because the dispo is missing, we cannot categorize it, or it is in progress and thus does not have a final disposition available.

3. Not eligible for expungement at any time (disqualified). There are several ways of being disqualified, eg:

  • being charged with a sex/murder based offense (regardless of disposition)
  • being charged with an offense ineligible per 100J (depending on which of the expungement criteria is being used)

  • 4 incidents

  • 2 nonguilty incidents

  • 2 guilty incidents

Progress

We have begun coding these questions in these files:

Previous analysis (2020)

Previous questions are detailed in this issue. Code to answer these questions are in 3 notebooks:

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