Fact-Checked: Why Trust Rittgers Rittgers & Nakajima In the mid-to-late nineties when I was a student at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, I played our school’s rugby team, also known as the “Exchequer Ruckers.” For those of you who are unfamiliar with graduate school and non-NCAA college rugby, essentially it is a beer-soaked athletic endeavor chock full of songs, beer, camaraderie, and male nudity. Beer is consumed before, during, and after the games from kegs on the sidelines, and the songs that are at the post-game parties often involve players taking off all their clothes, running around the pitch, and being chased by teammates who drench those players in whatever beer is on hand.
In addition to being a lot of fun, it was also a magnet for small, relatively minor interactions with law enforcement—think underage consumption, disorderly conduct, public indecency and the like—things that might have one brought in front of a court to receive a finger shaking, pay a small fine and be on one’s way.
How Did Record Sealing Work under Older Ohio Laws?
The number of friends I had in college and law school who have experienced this on account of rugby is more than zero, but less than a hundred, but most of them at this point in their lives have cleared their record through a process called record sealing. Back in the late nineties and the early aughts, record sealing was the only process available to you as a criminal defendant with a conviction to prevent the public from seeing your record, as the process involves hiding or “sealing” your criminal history from the general public and criminal background checks.
While the documents still exist, they are only accessible for extremely limited purposes by a very narrow subset of people, and the court rules that as a matter of law, the incident never occurred. The problem for a lot of people is that the rules governing record sealing were fairly strict, in that if one had more than a single conviction of any sort one was deemed to be an “ineligible offender” and could not have a record sealed.
Who Qualifies for Expungement or Record Sealing Under Current Ohio Eligibility Rules?
As the years rolled by, the legislature expanded the definition of eligible offender to include people with two convictions—either one felony and one misdemeanor or two misdemeanors, and even later increased the number of convictions but would bar applicants who were convicted of certain types of offenses.
After many different iterations, the current state of the law looks at whether or not the offense that the applicant is requesting to have sealed is eligible, and not the offender- so the number of offenses that a person has won’t preclude them from having their record sealed. So if you have applied for an expungement in the past and have been denied because you had too many offenses or because one of your offenses was disqualifying, you may be eligible now because of these changes.
What’s more, about four years ago the legislature added the remedy of expungement to the tools available to a criminal defendant. After a waiting period, for eligible offenses you are now able to not only get your cases sealed, but you can also have every single government record that references them destroyed. Not only does this create a legal space where as a matter of law the incident never happened, but it removes and destroys all government records referencing that incident. Certain offenses are excluded from both expungement and record sealing (e.g. certain domestic violence convictions, OVI/DUIs, high level felonies and felony crimes of violence, to name a few) but with those exceptions it would appear that a substantial portion of the criminal code is now available for sealing or expungement.
What Are the Next Steps to Clear an Old Conviction From Your Record?
Record sealing and expungement are sometimes a very straightforward process that involves filling out a form, paying an application fee to the court and getting a court date—but the ease or difficulty involved in obtaining them vary greatly depending upon the jurisdiction that one finds themselves in and the judge or magistrate one finds themselves in front of.
If you are someone with an old conviction on your record, it wouldn’t hurt at all to talk to an attorney to see if you are eligible, because that time you got at ticket for public intoxication on a rugby field when you were 20 shouldn’t have any bearing on your life when your own kids are halfway through college (and hopefully making better decisions that you did). While the law still has a way to go, very, very few people should be forever defined by the dumbest thing they’ve ever done, and now the law has greatly expanded to make that a possibility for hundreds of thousands of people who were otherwise ineligible.