Expungement

Expungement and record sealing seem pretty much the same at first. Both of them refer to shielding your criminal record from background checks. Both of them require you to go through a legal process, usually several years after you finish serving your sentence. And...

Washington State gives people with criminal records the chance to expunge their records, giving them the opportunity to put an old conviction behind them so it no longer holds them back. But the process is complicated, and many eligible people are intimidated or...

In many cases, the secondary consequences of a criminal conviction can far outweigh the original punishment. Long after you’ve paid your fines or served your time, a conviction on your record may limit where you can live, work and volunteer. Because convictions can...

If you have ever been convicted of a crime, you probably realize your punishment didn’t end when everyone else thought it did. Convictions come with long-lasting secondary effects. They may limit your rights, and they can hurt your chances for good-paying jobs. How...

The pain of the pandemic and the economic slowdown it caused have ensured that 2020 will be remembered as a historically bad year, but it did have one or two bright spots. One of those bright spots is found in the recently released FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which...