Advocates question delay in expunging criminal records

A new law that will automatically expunge the criminal records of up to 500,000 Minnesotans took effect Jan. 1. But it will take more time before people get the clean slate they were hoping for.

State officials now say it will take several more months to go through millions of criminal records and thousands of laws to determine whose records should be wiped clean.

That has left advocates of Minnesota’s Clean Slate Act feeling misled, they say. More importantly, they say thousands of people whose records should be wiped clean will continue to struggle to get housing and jobs as crimes show up on their background checks.

“It just seems that nobody cares about the people who are impacted by this,” said Jon Geffen, an attorney with the Legal Revolution law firm in St. Paul. “People are left in a state of perpetual punishment.”

He added: “It’s not a public safety issue; they’ve done their sentence. But they are kept from supporting their families as records will continue to be used to deny housing and employment.”

But Jill Oliveira, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), said the process of expungement is not simple. And it’s proven more time-consuming than expected.

“Actual expungement will take place in mid-May because of the complexity of system testing that must be done first,” she said in an email. “Each programming test runs against 16 million records and 16,000 statutes. Once that is completed in mid-March the courts have 60 days to review the records before they can actually be expunged.”

Since the law passed in 2023, making Minnesota one of 12 states to enact clean slate laws, staff members at the BCA and Minnesota Judicial Branch have encountered a slew of problems.

In a Dec. 19 post on the BCA website, officials said they’ve spent the last 18 months analyzing records and developing software to identify those people who are eligible to have their records expunged. But, in the past couple of months, “it became apparent that to fix discovered data issues and adequately test the system to ensure accuracy, we could not meet the Jan. 1, 2025, effective date.”

Those issues included “bugs” discovered during test runs of programming changes. Officials said they are confident most of the errors have been found and resolved.

Geffen said, however, Clean Slate’s delays are not an isolated incident. Other expungement bills passed by the 2023 Legislature “have not gone well,” he said.

A law passed to clear lower-level cannabis convictions expunged 57,000 cases from the BCA database, Geffen said. But, for some reason, 29,000 of those remain in court records. In addition, 90,000 felony convictions have been referred to the Cannabis Expungement Board. But “at this point, they’ve done nothing.”

Antonio Williams, founder of T.O.N.E. U.P. Inc., a Minneapolis-based organization that works to help people re-enter society, including how to expunge criminal records, said that even a few months’ delay can affect people’s lives and living conditions.

Expunging convictions that have been served allows people to move on with their lives in a positive direction, he said. And that makes for a safer community.

“The last thing you want to do is keep them in a corner, in a box,” Williams said. “This is not doing something that will cause a harm. This is something that will create an opportunity.”