A bill introduced in the Senate earlier this month that would automatically seal certain criminal records has set up a debate between supporters who say the legislation would give people with a criminal history a second chance to “reach their full potential” and opponents who worry this blanket approach goes too far.

Under current law, a person who has an eligible criminal conviction and has met certain statutory requirements can file a form seeking to seal the criminal records associated with the conviction. The person must then make the case that they have satisfied all the requirements to seal their record at a hearing, where prosecutors have an opportunity to submit testimony, after which a judge decides whether the records should be sealed. 

Criminal records sealed under court order are not erased, but they are not disclosed to third parties, including employers, lenders, landlords, school admissions officers and others.

The bill, L.D. 1911, introduced by Senator Rachel Talbot Ross (D-Portland) and cosponsored by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, would expand the list of eligible convictions to include all misdemeanor crimes, with significant exceptions including convictions for sexual assault, stalking and cruelty to animals, and would make the entire process automatic. 

Supporters of the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine and the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, said that even after a sentence is served, criminal convictions carry many unintended consequences.

“There’s always a balance between the public’s right to know and the individual’s right to privacy and my opinion is that we haven’t gotten that balance right as a society,” ACLU of Maine’s policy director Michael Kebede said. “We have sacrificed personal privacy on the altar of the public’s right to know for purposes of criminal records’ sealing and disclosure.”

In a statement, Jan M. Collins, Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition’s assistant director, said “In practice, a minor conviction is not over when the sentence is served. Instead, there are lifelong consequences that affect educational, employment, housing opportunities and more.”

Most people who have eligible convictions — all class E crimes, which carry up to a six-month sentence, except convictions for sexual assault, and convictions for now-decriminalized marijuana-related offenses — are not aware that they could get petition to get those records sealed, Kebede said.

According to a December 2024 report by the Criminal Records Review Committee, 14 motions to seal records were filed in 2023, of which eight were granted, five were denied and one was still pending. The same year, there were 14,300 convictions for all misdemeanor, or class E and class D, crimes (not all of which would be eligible for sealing.)

“You have to know that the system exists in order to take advantage of it,” Kebede said. But even when a person is aware of this process, the time and resources necessary to follow through with it makes it “inadequate.”

But without a more measured approach, freedom of information advocates worry that the bill could have unintended consequences.

There is significant public interest in having access to certain criminal records, especially for academics, said Judy Meyer, president of the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition and former executive editor of the Lewiston Sun Journal.

“If we seal all of that we lose the foundation of how our criminal justice system works and how prosecutions work and what happens to the people who are prosecuted,” she said.

“Having access to records is not, as some people think, just a way to guarantee somebody’s bad record follows them around. But it’s a way to guarantee that our courts and our prosecutors and our law enforcement agencies are charging and prosecuting and convicting people fairly, regardless of race, poverty, who their defense counsel is –– but that we have some equity and fairness in the system.”

Of greater concern to Meyer is that the topic hasn’t been studied deeply enough.

“We owe it to the public and to our courts and our prosecutors to make sure that if we’re going to move forward with something, that it’s workable and fair, and it doesn’t whitewash the academic interest in having access to those records.”

The sponsor of the bill, Sen. Talbot Ross, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In its final report, the committee, which included then-Speaker of the House Talbot Ross, Kebede, Meyer and the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition’s executive director, Joseph Jackson, recognized that “without a true ‘clean slate’ or automatic record-clearing process most defendants who meet the criteria to have their records cleared will not benefit from the process.”

Pennsylvania was the first state to enact a “clean slate” law in 2018. Eleven other states, including California, New York and Utah, and Washington, D.C. have since passed similar legislation.

A majority of the committee’s 29 members, including Sen. Talbot Ross, recommended that a permanent commission study “how to establish an automatic record sealing process for adult criminal convictions, both which crimes should be eligible for automatic sealing and how to implement the process.”

“To now introduce L.D. 1911, which is a bill that automatically seals certain records without review of a permanent CRRC, attempts to override the efforts of the current Criminal Records Review Committee, which had rejected such a blanket approach for the number of eligible crimes outlined in this bill,” Dan MacLeod, executive editor of the Bangor Daily News and a member of the committee, said in a statement on behalf of the Maine Press Association.

Among the committee’s other recommendations was to enact legislation that would direct the Maine Commission on Public Defense Services to assist individuals seeking to seal their criminal records, which Kebede, Meyer and MacLeod all said they support. Under current law, those seeking to seal their criminal records are not entitled to public representation if they can’t afford an attorney. A public hearing on the bill, L.D. 1856, was held last week.

As of Friday, L.D. 1911 had been referred to the Judiciary Committee without further action.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.