According to the Governor's Office, there are fewer than 400 petitions remaining from the backlog that had built up under prior administrations.
As always, a warm congratulations goes out to all those receiving their pardons!
Illinois governor Bruce Rauner released his eleventh batch of clemency decisions ahead of Labor Day weekend. Included were eight clemency petitions granted and 118 denied. All eight clemency actions came in the form of a pardon with authorization to expunge the criminal record. The pardoned convictions included burglary, domestic battery, deceptive practice, criminal damage to property, attempted armed robbery, and aggravated battery.
According to the Governor's Office, there are fewer than 400 petitions remaining from the backlog that had built up under prior administrations. As always, a warm congratulations goes out to all those receiving their pardons!
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Yesterday, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed a bill into law which will eliminate the requirement that a person have no convictions on his record in order to expunge a case. Under the old law, a conviction for even the smallest infraction (for example, a fine on a ticket for underage drinking) would mean that a person could not expunge anything else from his criminal record, even if those charges were dropped.
Although that person could have sealed the dismissed case, there are certain circumstances where an expungement is necessary for furthering someone's goals. Now, the law will determine the eligibility to expunge based solely on the case itself, rather than also on the person. The new law will also waive the filing fees for many expungement petitions in Cook County during 2017. Petitioners in Cook County will not have to pay filing fees when the case(s) sought to be expunged resulted in acquittal or dismissal. This provision is set to expire at the end of 2017. This afternoon, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner released his tenth batch of executive clemency decisions ahead of the 4th of July weekend. For this batch, Rauner decided on 157 petitions, granting seven and denying 150. Of the seven granted, six came in the form of pardon with authorization to expunge, while the other was a commutation of sentence. According to the governor's office, roughly 500 petitions remain in the backlog from previous administrations.
Congratulations to those receiving clemency, and happy Independence Day to all! According to Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times, former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. recently sent a letter to Chicago Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) criticizing Beale’s proposed ordinance to add regulation for rideshare companies Uber and Lyft. Beale’s proposed ordinance would, among other things, mandate drivers for Uber and Lyft to submit to fingerprint background checks.
Holder posits that the fingerprint-based background check can have a discriminatory impact on communities of color. He notes that the FBI records from which the fingerprint checks are drawn are often incomplete and do not always show the results of the arrest. Because people of color are statistically more likely to pick up an arrest, their communities would be disproportionately impacted, even when (as is often the case) those arrests do not result in a conviction. I support Holder’s criticisms. In my work, people often come to me with their FBI records looking for an expungement or sealing. It is actually relatively rare for the records to comprehensively contain all the information about what happened in a case. They can be a good starting point for me to figure out what is on a person’s record, but they are mostly worthless for determining eligibility to expunge or seal because they so often don’t list the outcomes of the cases. The ironic part of this is that Uber and Lyft already perform background checks on potential drivers. Many clients have come to me needing to expunge or seal their record specifically because they didn’t pass the background check for these companies. The difference though is that those background checks are designed for employment purposes and therefore typically obtain the disposition information. Tuesday is primary election day in Illinois, and here in Chicago one candidate is dealing with the same struggle many of my clients face—trying to obtain or keep a job despite the stigma of a criminal record. In a hotly contested race for the 5th District Illinois Assembly Seat, voters received campaign mailers featuring an old mugshot photo of incumbent Rep. Ken Dunkin. The date stamp indicates the photo is nearly 20 years old. In addition to the mugshot, the Sun-Times reported that the mailer listed information about the alleged crimes that may be incomplete and inaccurate.
Dunkin’s opponent, Juliana Stratton, insists her campaign had no involvement with sending the mailer. Nonetheless, she has failed to denounce the scare-mongering tactic. She told the Sun-Times that while she’s “an advocate for a second chance” she believes candidates for public office should be held to “a higher standard.” While there may be some validity to her point, a mailer that paints a candidate in broad strokes as a criminal thug clearly seeks to provoke a knee-jerk disgusted reaction from voters. This type of labelling of individuals as criminals or felons without any explanation or context for their mistakes is what we at the Bryant Chavez Law Office fight against every day. For a politician like Dunkin, it’s one issue among many that citizens will use to decide whether to vote for him. For ordinary people applying for jobs, it often means outright and immediate rejection. Dunkin is lucky he has a public platform for explaining himself. Regular people with criminal records do not, which is why it’s so important that we have opportunities for reformed individuals to expunge or seal their old cases. In advance of Christmas, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner released his sixth batch of executive clemency decisions today. Of the 254 clemency petitions acted on, seven were granted. All seven clemency actions came in the form of pardons with the authorization to expunge the cases from their criminal record. The linked article includes the list of the seven that received the pardons. According to Governor Rauner's office, about 1,000 clemency petitions remain in the backlog.
Congratulations to those receiving their pardons! I'm sure your good tidings will make for a great holiday season. For those denied or pending, have a Merry Christmas and keep hope alive because your time may still come. The Illinois legislature recently passed a bill that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of cannabis. If Governor Rauner signs the bill, the new law would make the possession of less than 15 grams of cannabis a civil violation, punishable by a fine no more than $125. Currently, possession of small amounts of cannabis is subject to arrest for criminal misdemeanor charges which can result in hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines and costs, and potentially even jail time.
This step toward decriminalization is not new in Illinois. Many local municipalities, including Chicago, already have directives in place for their police departments to issue tickets for small cannabis possession, rather than arresting the offender. However, those ordinance violations, despite intending to “decriminalize,” still do in fact create criminal records for the defendants. Not only are the ordinance violations visible to the public just like any other criminal charge, but a conviction for it can undermine a person’s eligibility to expunge another case, even if that other case would otherwise be eligible to expunge. Where this bill is truly different though is that it proposes to also change the Criminal Identification Act, which establishes the laws for expunging and sealing criminal records in Illinois. If it becomes law, the bill would make courts and police agencies expunge the tickets from their records automatically every six months. This is a major shift in treatment for these types of cases. No other adult records in Illinois (criminal cases or ordinance violations) automatically expunge. Even if you are arrested by mistake and released right away, you must still petition the court to expunge the case from the police records. By automatically expunging the records, the Illinois legislature is essentially saying that they are not concerned with repeated cannabis violators. In fact, the idea may be to account for them as a tax on cannabis use over its prohibition. Regardless, this bill would certainly lead to fewer criminal records for people doing something that is quickly trending toward acceptable in Illinois and the United States. On this Friday before Memorial Day, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner decided on 151 executive clemency petitions, granting seven and denying 144. This is now Rauner's second batch of decisions, after he released his first in April.
The Governor's office has stated multiple times that they have developed a process to review petitions on a regular basis. Releasing a set of decisions in consecutive months is a good indicator that this process will result in more frequent batches of decisions. That will certainly help to finally rid Illinois of the backlog of clemency petitions that have plagued the state since the Blagojevich era. However, the praise for the Governor must be muted when one considers the disappointingly low rate that petitions have been granted thus far. Rauner needs to show better compassion for the people of Illinois working hard to move on from a mistake made long ago. Pardons and expungements are there to help those who have proven rehabilitated and are ready to move on with their lives unencumbered by the yoke of a criminal record. How much talent are we wasting by forcing people to wear the scarlet letter of "convicted felon" their entire lives? Congratulations to those granted a pardon today! I hope and expect to see more join you on subsequent batches of decisions. In one of his final batches of executive clemency decisions before leaving office, Governor Quinn granted 179 petitions and denied 425 this Christmas Eve. That brings Quinn's total number of clemency decisions to 3,962 with 1,418 of them granted.
A separate Christmas Eve article in the Chicago Tribune examined the state of clemency petitions in Illinois, while detailing a couple of petitioners seeking pardons based on their claims of innocence. Although Quinn has a good track record of granting pardons for petitioners showing rehabilitation, he has been far more hesitant to grant pardons declaring the innocence of those wrongfully convicted. The article is well worth the read, and not just because I am quoted in it (though that never hurts). Congratulations to all of you receiving clemency on this holiday! Now that you can move on with your rights restored and your convictions expunged, I am sure that this will always be remembered as a very merry Christmas. Recently, the Illinois Senate passed a bill which would expand the universe of cases eligible for sealing. The Illinois House previously passed it in March. Assuming that Governor Quinn signs the bill, it will allow those convicted of most misdemeanor violent crimes to seal those cases. Previously, any violent crime conviction, misdemeanor or felony, was not eligible to seal or expunge. The only option to remove these types of offenses from a criminal record was executive clemency. Under this new bill, misdemeanor violent offenses (except for a few listed exceptions, such as domestic battery) will be eligible to be sealed by the court directly.
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We provide criminal defense legal services in Illinois, focusing on the expungement and sealing of criminal records.
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