Everyone makes mistakes. Most of the time these do not have any great lasting consequences but sometimes they can have massive consequences such as when your mistake leads to an encounter with the police and perhaps the court system.
Even if you were never actually convicted of a crime, your interaction with the police and court system could weigh heavily around your neck for years to come. If the law makes you eligible for redemption of some form, then it is worth considering.
You might not always understand the full consequences of that mistake
Let’s say a court decided you were not guilty. Logic would dictate that means you get to live life on the same footing as you were before the interaction with the police. Yet that’s not always how it works in reality.
Background checks often pick up on your police or court interaction and can penalize you as a result. Employers, colleges, local housing authorities, volunteer organizations and more all tend to run background checks on people. The computer systems they use to do these checks don’t always make proper allowances for whether someone was cleared or not. Rather, they just flag your application as concerning or discard it outright.
If the application makes it through to someone in the human resources department, they may not take the time to learn why your application was flagged. They may just toss it aside and opt for candidates whose applications came through as clean. While that is unfair, it is how things often work.
Any form of redemption you might be eligible for depends very much on the circumstances of your original encounter with the police. What was the alleged offense? How old were you at the time? What was the end result? How long ago did it happen?
Getting help to explore what, if any, options for redemption you have could be the start to a better, fairer future.