A Senate panel approved legislation Monday that would bar the New Jersey State Police from releasing information about to-be-expunged crimes in the course of background checks.
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A New Jersey Senate panel has just approved a new bill that could prevent the State Police from sharing details about crimes that are in the process of being expunged during background checks. This legislation passed with unanimous support from the Senate Law and Public Safety Committee and comes at a time when the state is dealing with a huge backlog of expungement requests, some of which are delayed by months or even years. The surge in expungement applications has been driven by the legalization of marijuana and other efforts to clear past offenses.
Assemblywoman Annette Quijano (D-Union), who sponsored the bill, emphasized the urgency of fixing these delays, saying, “We have to do better. These are residents of New Jersey. We have been holding up their lives for up to two years.”
In New Jersey, there are several expungement programs that allow individuals to clear arrests or convictions from their records. Depending on the situation, people may be eligible to have their records expunged after 10 years or even sooner if they’ve completed their sentences, paid fines, and avoided further offenses.
The law currently states that once a record is expunged, no one outside of law enforcement, the courts, or corrections can access those details. However, delays in processing expungement orders have led to cases where employers have received information about past convictions that should have been sealed.
Quijano pointed out the impact these delays have had on people’s lives. “You can’t get a job, you can’t get housing, you can’t get money to go to school to better yourself. Some can’t even get into the military. It goes on and on,” she said.
Not everyone is convinced that the bill will help. Some officials are concerned that shifting resources to manually check pending expungement orders could actually slow down the process further. Steve Finkel, the director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Attorney General, explained that the volume of expungement applications has ballooned, thanks to cannabis legalization and recent legislation that broadened the scope of offenses eligible for expungement. Annual expungement requests have jumped from around 13,000 to roughly 50,000.
“We fully agree with the assemblywoman that expungement orders should be processed quickly, but the problem has been the exponential expansion of expungement eligibility,” Finkel said. He also warned that manually checking background checks for pending orders could make the backlog even worse.
In fact, the delays have already led to a class-action lawsuit filed by the Office of the Public Defender last year. Several individuals claimed that they lost out on jobs and other opportunities because their expungement orders were delayed for months, sometimes years. That case is still in mediation, and in August, the parties reached a temporary agreement to speed up certain expungement cases.
“It’s not fair that we didn’t figure this out sooner, and yet all these years, we’re derailing lives,” Quijano added.
The full Assembly passed an earlier version of this bill in late September, also with unanimous support. Since the Senate made changes to the bill, the Assembly will need to vote on it again before it can be sent to Governor Phil Murphy’s desk for final approval.
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