North Carolina lawmakers say yes to restoring automatic erasure of some criminal charges

North Carolina lawmakers voted to restore automatic expunctions of some state criminal charges after overcoming previous reservations among Republican House members.

Top GOP lawmakers appointed to negotiate an agreement between the House and Senate released a compromise bill on Wednesday. It allows court clerks to keep expunged records as confidential files to be shared only with former defendants, their attorneys, prosecutors and others.

That bill was quickly approved by both the Senate and House. It will be sent to Gov. Roy Cooper for his signature.

Sen. Danny Britt, who helped negotiate the compromise, told lawmakers that it was “essentially the same bill” that the Senate passed unanimously last year. That bill would have implemented fixes to the expunction process that the General Assembly had twice paused.

“Literally thousands of North Carolinians will genuinely benefit from housing, jobs, and so much more by your vote today,” said Democratic Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, who thanked Britt and other Republicans for getting the Senate’s original proposal back.

Starting Dec. 1, 2021, a law Republicans and Democrats passed in June 2020 required the state court system to automatically erase records of dismissed or acquitted criminal cases.

But while the law was meant to help improve outcomes of those unsuccessfully charged, the immediate destruction of records that started in 2021 created problems for both them and for law enforcement. Legislators paused its implementation twice as a result.

The road to expunctions

Automatic expunctions went into effect in North Carolina under the Second Chance Act, a major criminal justice reform bill that lawmakers unanimously passed in 2020.

They are needed, criminal justice reform advocates say, to automatically erase thousands of criminal charges after acquittals and dismissals.

Those who are most in need of expunctions, criminal justice reform advocates argue, don’t have the time or resources to petition courts to get charges erased on their own, even though it could improve their job and housing prospects.

“Expunctions can change people’s lives,” said Lindsay Bass-Patel, a Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law attorney and policy analyst, wrote in an opinion column for The Charlotte Observer.

But after files were immediately destroyed, sheriffs, prosecutors and defendants found they had no public record to prove the cases were dismissed.

North Carolina went from processing merely 16,400 expunctions in 2020-21 to 421,925 the next year, according to the Administrative Office of the Courts.

In response to a number of issues, legislators paused the process twice starting in August 2022 as a committee of North Carolina criminal justice leaders explored solutions.

In March 2023, a bill outlining solutions and the process to resume the expunction process appeared to be moving forward. North Carolina senators unanimously passed fixes based on recommendations by a 16-member committee that included representatives from the Conference of District Attorneys, the Second Chance Alliance, and the State Bureau of Investigation.

On May 22 this year, the bill advanced to a North Carolina House of Representatives House Judiciary 2 Committee, where it was gutted.

At the hearing, Rep. Sarah Stevens, the Republican chair for the committee, proposed changes that repealed the automatic expunctions. Stevens outlined initial problems stemming from court records not being retained when cases were being automatically expunged. Stevens successfully pushed through the committee a bill that repeals the automatic expunction process.

Stevens said the amended bill has a provision that allows people seeking expunctions to file a petition that the court must rule on in 90 days.

Rep. Joe John, a Raleigh Democrat, and others pointed out before a June 5 House vote that the initial Second Chance Act had overwhelming support by the House and the Senate, and Stevens never gave the proposed fixes a chance.

“What Representative Stevens, with all due respect, is asking us to do, is …. throw out the promises of the Second Chance Act with this bill,” John said.

The House passed it 59-45, mostly split down party lines on June 5, 2024.

Six days later, the Senate didn’t support the bill repealing the automatic expunctions in a 1 to 45 vote. The conflict between the House and the Senate bill sent the conversation to the five-person committee that includes Stevens and Britt, one of the primary sponsors of the Second Chance Act.

Virginia Bridges covers criminal justice in the Triangle and across North Carolina for The News & Observer. Her work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The N&O maintains full editorial control of its journalism.