Projo Politics Blog

Despite efforts over the years by the minority community, the criminal defense bar and the gun lobby to shorten the waiting periods, this law remains intact and was used to remove 4,360 misdemeanors and 625 felonies from the public record last year alone, and 28,417 criminal cases from the public record since 2000.

The bill that is headed for a Senate Judiciary Committee vote tonight, H7583, would automatically “quash and destroy’’ any record of a crime for which the accused received a deferred sentence, regardless of the individual’s criminal history or the nature of the crime.

Deferred sentences are often the result of a plea bargain with state prosecutors, in which the state is spared a trial and the accused is spared time in jail as long as they keep the peace for a period of time that usually runs five years.

In recent years, such sentences have gone to accused stalkers, embezzlers, an admitted accomplice to a gunpoint robbery in Waterplace Park who traded testimony for a reduced sentence, an executive secretary to the Barrington Police chief who stole town money, one of the admitted co-conspirators in the Lincoln bribery scandal and at least one child molester.

The legislation to purge these cases from the public record was sparked by a November decision by the Rhode Island Supreme Court on the treatment of cases in which the admitted criminal had been given a deferred prison sentence.

The court’s decision centered on two admitted criminals foiled by a judge in their efforts to get their records expunged. One had pleaded no contest to second-degree robbery; the other to a drug-possession charge. Both received deferred sentences. They both appealed to the high court after a judge ruled them ineligible for expungement: the first because he had committed a violent crime, and the second because she got into further trouble.

"Because they never were actually sentenced," their lawyer argued that "they had not been convicted of any offense and therefore all records involving their arrest and plea should be erased."

But the Supreme Court disagreed. Since "a plea of nolo contendere is an implied confession of guilt," the court said "it follows that such a plea constitutes a conviction for purposes of weighing who is and is not eligible for expungement, even when it has been followed by a deferred sentence."

The bill headed for the Senate committee vote would allow the automatic erasure the Supreme Court rejected as ill-reasoned.