Much as the concept of paying one’s debt to society is a quaint arcane notion for those who have done wrong (or not) and served their sentence, so too is the notion that acquittal or dismissal of criminal charges means people are returned to the place they should have been but for the mistake.  Ah yes, the good old days, when a person could walk away from a false criminal accusation to return to his rightful place in society. Gone.

Via the New York Times :

Across much of the country, sealing or clearing a criminal record after a wrongful conviction is a tangled and expensive process, advocates and former prisoners say. It can take years of appeals to courts and pleas to governors to wipe the slate clean. Even then, many felony convictions remain on federal databases and pop up during background checks or at traffic stops.

Would it shock you to learn that the government is remarkably good about making sure any charge against a person in input into its myriad databases?  It would be unthinkable, and invariably embarrassing, if an accused criminal wasn’t immediately recognizable to any law enforcement agency charged with keeping the bad people away from the good people.

Unfortunately, the government isn’t nearly as good at getting the names of those whose accusations didn’t pan out off the lists.  It’s not their fault, of course. Limited manpower. Low priority. And they’re probably guilty of something anyway.  After all, they were arrested and charged, and it’s not like the government would charge someone who wasn’t a bad dude.

Clearing a criminal record can take years and cost thousands of dollars in legal fees, and differs widely state to state. Many require that defendants return to court to prove their innocence, a higher hurdle than showing that charges were dismissed or a conviction was overturned. In some states, a governor’s pardon is needed. It can be a complex process, which advocates say is made even more difficult by a lack of support services for the exonerated.

There tends to be some common themes among the wrongfully charged. They’re poor. They have no clout. Nobody gives a damn about what happens to them after the case is tossed.  For the most part, the attitude that they got lucky and got away with it prevails, as opposed to the belief that they are presumed innocent and that presumption remains intact.  Another fine platitude, universally ignored.

And the criminal history is only a part of the problem.

Of course, blotting out a criminal record does not solve everything. Researchers have found that high percentages of the wrongfully convicted slide into poverty or substance abuse as they struggle to rebuild a life outside prison. How do you explain a 10-year gap on a résumé? How do you answer a yes-or-no question from a prospective employer asking whether you have ever been convicted of a felony?

The answer to the latter question, at least in New York, is that once a conviction has been vacated, it never happened as a matter of law, so that one can enjoy the legal fiction that you were never arrested and never convicted. But that doesn’t explain what you’ve been up to for the past decade.  Potential employers tend to pick up on those sorts of things. And the truthful explanation, that you were wrongfully convicted of rape and murder and finally released, tends not to get nearly as good a reception as one might imagine.

The Times piece omits yet another factor that can’t be ignored. Even when exercising one’s right to claim, as the law may permit, that one has never been convicted of a crime, the potential employer will run the applicant’s criminal history anyway.  They will search the internet. They will find out whether the applicant is telling the truth, at least from the distant perspective of the employer.  

No amount of official expungement or sealing of criminal records, even if done properly and diligently by the government, is going to clean up the internet.  There is now a cottage industry in providing potential employers with criminal histories of applicants, and they not only provide a decidedly unreliable source of information, but there is no way to know whether the bad stuff they purchase from the cops and courts will ever be changed or deleted when the conviction goes away.

Some see this as the price of transparency, and how cool is it to be able to go to a website to find out whether the nice couple who moved in down the block are convicted child molesters?  Yet again, those who don’t see the price as too high tend to be the ones who don’t think they will ever have to pay. Giving up other people’s rights is hardly a concern for those with clean histories. Of course, if they happen to have names similar to people with more sordid pasts, they may change their minds.

In the meantime, this creates yet another constituency of people who will comprise a permanent underclass, unable to break away from the taint of false accusation and wrongful conviction, and doomed to struggle with employment, housing and, well, basic survival.  But then, since they were arrested, they must have done something wrong to deserve a life of misery.  Right?