New Felony Clean Slate law proposed in Pennsylvania

A brand new proposal in Pennsylvania would make it easy for most people convicted of felony drug charges to have their records erased. House Bill 1826, sponsored by State Representatives Jordan Harris (D-Philadelphia) and Sheryl Delozier (R-Cumberland), would expand a 2018 law that provides for lower level misdemeanor charges to be sealed if the person has not been arrested or cited in the intervening ten year period after conviction. The bill has received bi-partisan support and is being pushed by Governor Tom Wolf and Lt. Governor John Fetterman.

What does this mean to you if you have a felony drug conviction? The bill will likely mirror the 2018 law that applies to misdemeanors, so besides having to wait crime-free for ten years, you likely will be offered an “automatic” sealing of your record at that time.

“Automatic” sealing sounds great, right? Except that it doesn’t seem to always work that way. We have been inundated with clients who are promised an “automatic” sealing, apply for a job, and find out the record is still there. They lose the job opportunity, probably can’t regain it in the future, and then end up paying us to seal the record that supposedly was already sealed. Why does this happen? The government wants credit for this sort of plan, but no one can be bothered to scrutinize the petitions or processes to make sure they work, and when the government does the work for you, they do a government job. For instance, they may not send Court Orders out to every agency that should seal or expunge a record, and they certainly don’t carefully monitor compliance with the Orders. So if an agency is sent an Order but it is lost in the mail, lost in the shuffle, or otherwise inexplicably not complied with, no one is the wiser until the client is denied a job opportunity. Make sure you have a lawyer watching every step of the way!