State faces more delays in expunging some criminal records under Clean Slate Act

Minnesotans expecting to have a clean slate by Jan. 1 — when the process was expected to start for expunging records for some minor and nonviolent crimes — were already disappointed when state officials acknowledged a likely delay to mid-May.

But now it’s unlikely to happen by then, either, said Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). The result is that an estimated 500,000 Minnesotans who qualify to have their criminal records automatically expunged will likely see those records showing up on criminal background checks for months to come.

It’s a delay Evans said he’s willing to accept — better that than endanger the public with a conviction not showing up when it should.

“Ultimately, at the end of the day, that’s what’s really important is to make sure that we don’t seal records that should not be,” Evans said in a recent interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune. “At the end of the day, the BCA isn’t going to do something that would put others potentially in harm’s way, and we need to do it right.”

But Jon Geffen, an attorney with the Legal Revolution law firm in St. Paul, said the delay really means that thousands of people will continue to be denied jobs, housing and other benefits when they shouldn’t.

“We had people ready to start the expungement process and we told them to wait, that Clean Slate was going to do all that,” Geffen said. “We’re feeling like fools now. And I just don’t understand why [the delay].”

To put it simply, officials said, it’s been a technological slog to create a computer program merging 16 million criminal records with 16,000 state statutes before automatically sealing eligible, mostly non-violent misdemeanor, petty misdemeanor and low-level felony convictions.

The idea was simple enough: Wipe away records for relatively minor convictions for which people have already satisfied their sentences to give them a better chance at rebuilding their lives. When Minnesota passed the Clean Slate Act in 2023, it became one of 12 states to enact such laws.

While people can petition to have criminal records expunged, the process can be daunting for many. Clean Slate, proponents say, would do it automatically and benefit more people.

But from the beginning, when staffers started working on computer programming, there were problems. These ranged from slight variations in case numbers and statute numbers between the BCA and court records to different wording in how cases were adjudicated, Evans said.

The result was that every time the automated system encountered a problem, records often had be checked by hand, delaying the the process until mistakes could be corrected. All while keeping the background check system available to the public.

“We have been encountering data discrepancies that we’re resolving, but we need to resolve them as we encounter them with the court system to make sure that the records on their end really match ours,” Evans said. “That’s where the complexity in this comes.”

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi is a big believer in the idea of giving low-level offenders a fresh start. It’s about fairness, he said, and making sure “we have a justice system that works for everybody.”

Sine 2019, Choi’s office has cleared 1,000 records through “expungement by prosecutor agreement.”

“We have to stop punishing people after they do everything we’ve asked them to do,” Choi said. “And we can’t help people become whole if their past records create significant barriers in employment, housing and access to benefits.”

While Choi is a supporter of the Clean Slate Act, he said he is glad that the BCA is taking its time to get it right. Many states, he said, have been struggling for years to enact their own clean slate laws.

“I’m glad the department is being transparent about it,” he said.

The Justice Action Network, based in Washington, D.C., has been a leading voice for bipartisan criminal justice reform, including promoting clean slate laws. On Tuesday, officials issued a statement saying they are aware of the delays in Minnesota.

“But our understanding is that the IT issue has been identified, and BCA is working on resolving it. We really hope it’s fixed quickly so that eligible Minnesotans can receive the second chance they’re entitled to under Minnesota’s Clean Slate Act.”

Network officials, as well as Choi, said they still planned on attending a Clean Slate celebration in St. Paul on Monday “as a reminder of what kind of progress is achievable when politics are put aside to focus on impactful policy, especially in Minnesota’s current political environment.”

Still, those who yearn for the normalcy an implemented Clean Slate Act would give their lives said they’re disappointed by the delays.

Roberta, a client of Geffen’s firm who did not want to give her last name for fear of reprisal by landlords and others, has been turned away from jobs and apartments because of convictions years ago for petty theft.

“It has been so unbelievably hard. I literally have to have my housing in my father’s name,” she said. “And I’ve been turned down for jobs. They deem me untrustworthy. They’d rather someone without a record.”

A clean slate, she said, would mean “I could get my life back.”